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by welearnednothng
2187 days ago
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The CEO of Basecamp posted a response to all of this on they Hey website that I found to be an interesting take that I hadn't seen talked about elsewhere. An all too brief summary is that customers coming in through the App Store are not your customers - they're Apple's, and you lose the ability to support them. That falls on Apple, and Apple will inevitably fall short of expectations. Most recently, I spent several years at a subscription-based company. The size of their customer support dwarfed technology, operations (the company ships physical goods), and even sales. And without the 1,000+ hours/week of work by customer support, the company would have seen so much churn to have long ago been out of business. Yes, it would be great to have a situation where everything works perfectly, no customer ever has a problem (even when those problems are well outside of your control), and are 110% happy... but that's just not a reality for many companies. https://hey.com/apple/iap/ |
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The problem is that Big Tech derives its enormous power from the network effects that are pervasive on the "network", the internet. Network effects put users in the position where they can in theory just go "start their own" (phone platform, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), but network effects are so powerful that even the other giants are locked out of each other's occupied territory.
I want to see laws put in place that gradually remove from big companies the rights that individuals and small companies must have (ex: right to refuse service, right to charge what you want, etc.) as a company becomes very large by any one or more of several criteria that include monopoly of a network-effects-based niche or simply number of users (ex: beginning at, say, >10M users).
If you want more users, you'll have to relinquish some control over each. If you insist on complete control, just don't try to extend it beyond a limited number of users.
Apple could have all the control they wanted over a much smaller market and stop growing or continue to grow with less control. License iOS and do whatever you want with your slice of the iOS market, or allow users and software companies to bypass the store and offer the "safety" of the store as an option instead of a command, etc.
Twitter, Facebook, Youtube would never again have to argue for why they need to be free to promote some opinions and silence others if any system that big had to federate their protocols so anyone could post anything from their own provider, like email. Then the big companies could offer their "safety" as an opt-in service. As long as people could say, "thanks, but I'll decide for myself whose feed to subscribe to", they could be completely free to define "safety" any way they wanted.
Amazon likewise would have to open more and more of their infrastructure to competitors if they wanted to be giant. If you're giant, you have to serve small competitors, not put them out of business. The more customers you have, the less power you can maintain over each.