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Thanks for the clarification. Perhaps the operative distinction here is between parasitic and symbiotic corporations. Ideally they are symbiotic with other play

Thanks for the clarification. Perhaps the operative distinction here is between parasitic and symbiotic corporations. Ideally they are symbiotic with other players in the eocsystem, rather than parasitic, but I think all corporations have a temptation and a tendency to end up as parasitic monopolies. Re Google, I wasn't saying they don't create value, far from it, I was saying they don't create value for readers with advertising. I concede this is a debatable point though for the reasons you mentioned, and it is really a subjective. Personally I don't find their advertising useful, and if anything think it targets me mostly with sites I've already engaged with and wastes the money of advertisers. There is a tension in their services because they depend on advertising, and the temptation (which thy have increasingly given in to on their search service recently) is to favour advertisers (the real customers) over end users - a classic problem in a two-sided market. To be clear though, I was not saying google are evil, but that just shifting the value around is what businesses do and what Google does - creating value is a very slippery and subjective concept and I'd argue their services which create value (mail etc) are funded by those that don't (advertising). So I would not use that particular behaviour as a criticism of the companies mentioned in the article - they might be objectionable, immoral or even illegal (I'd say probably all three) but they are not easy to distinguish from normal businesses in terms of how they shift value around.

wpietri 12y ago
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I believe that value is subjective, in that it's value to humans, but it's not particularly slippery. I also believe that for almost all businesses value creation is separate from cash extraction. My ISP's internet connection, for example, delivers a lot of value to me, but getting a bill from them doesn't. Google Search delivers a lot of value to me, but having ads on the page often doesn't. However, Google Search ads do deliver value to advertisers, and sometimes they deliver value to users when they discover novel products that are helpful to them. I think the value analysis for Sweetch and Monkey Parking is pretty clear. People want to park quickly and easily near wherever they're going. Monkey Parking makes that easier for some people, which appears to create value on the per-customer level. But it only does that by making parking harder for other people, so the app delivers no net gain in value. Indeed, by in effect paying people hang out in parking spaces until somebody pays them to leave, they are probably making the parking problem worse, resulting in a net destruction of value. I think the analysis for the restaurant reservation thing is similar. For each person they get in, they are excluding somebody else who would have had a table. Net value gain: zero. Or possibly negative given that squatting on reservations means that some will go unfilled. So in both cases, they seem to be parasites on the actual creators of value. This can be easier to see if you contrast them with the parking startups that do make parking easier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7986950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7986950

wpietri 12y ago

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I believe that value is subjective, in that it's value to humans, but it's not particularly slippery. I also believe that for almost all businesses value creation is separate from cash extraction. My ISP's internet connection, for example, delivers a lot of value to me, but getting a bill from them doesn't. Google Search delivers a lot of value to me, but having ads on the page often doesn't. However, Google Search ads do deliver value to advertisers, and sometimes they deliver value to users when they discover novel products that are helpful to them. I think the value analysis for Sweetch and Monkey Parking is pretty clear. People want to park quickly and easily near wherever they're going. Monkey Parking makes that easier for some people, which appears to create value on the per-customer level. But it only does that by making parking harder for other people, so the app delivers no net gain in value. Indeed, by in effect paying people hang out in parking spaces until somebody pays them to leave, they are probably making the parking problem worse, resulting in a net destruction of value. I think the analysis for the restaurant reservation thing is similar. For each person they get in, they are excluding somebody else who would have had a table. Net value gain: zero. Or possibly negative given that squatting on reservations means that some will go unfilled. So in both cases, they seem to be parasites on the actual creators of value. This can be easier to see if you contrast them with the parking startups that do make parking easier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7986950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7986950