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by steveads
2460 days ago
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Thanks for your feedback. You definitely make some good points that I understand, but probably just don't weight as heavily as you do. 1) Gaining critical mass is definitely a barrier to entry for competition. I'm just less sold that Facebook's current popularity is not due to it's foothold in the space vs it's utility. 2) Economy of scale is what allows these companies to offer their services to me as 'free'. I don't really mind that Facebook or Google have taken something that is useless to me (my personal browsing history, locations, likes, etc) and found a way to monetize it if I get to use their platform for free in return. 3) I'm not sure that breaking up big tech would significantly discourage their 'moat maintaining' behavior. If anything, with additional competition introduced, wouldn't there be even more incentive to put time and resource into maintaining what majority they have? |
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1) Yeah, hard to say. If it's utility, building a product that can compete with _all_ of Facebook right out of the door seems quite difficult. You'd be constantly battling the network effect as you built up the software to match their use cases—worse, you'd be spreading yourself thin right when you should be focusing on your 'core' product.
2) I'd be more okay with it, if they were more upfront about it maybe? But again, like point one, probably something that I feel affinity towards. I do often have problems with "free" products that really are not... I suppose it's not like they're trumpeting the cost lead.
3) That's a valid question eh? It's difficult to know, when other large firms were broken up long ago it was under an entirely different environment. I'd like to think that the previous players, in order to continue to interoperate with eachother (because, advantages), would implement some kind of protocol to do so: essentially opening up the platform so pieces that don't overlap can still work together—or allow you to pick and choose those pieces. But, complex, and regulatory forcing of a business to 'do-work' is often a non-starter... so who knows how that'd end up.
All interesting...