| > Waving your hands and throwing random numbers around doesn't imply a presence of cost. Come on, let's not go in circles. I posited there is a cost to user in being locked into a single app store. You claimed if there was such cost, we necessarily would have seen decrease in user demand. My handwaving numbers were to demonstrate that it doesn't have to be true, there can be substantial user costs without any decrease in user demand. > giving away valuable things for free, or selling them at or below cost, in order to capture users and sell their data and their eyeballs or corner markets You're close but not there. Being able to give away things for free come from the giant profits accumulated through monopolistic vertical integration. Google has a compute platform that runs a search engine/youtube that sells adds that is viewed through their browser that runs on their mobile phone. Those are multiple integration points (though not all are monopolistic). If for example Google were to pay for an external compute platform that is not theirs, they would have to pay for the profit margin of the service provider, but without is all of that money stays within the company, and that is one of the factors that enable them "giving away valuable things for free". Data integration is a completely different game. Selling data to outside is the least powerful way to make money out of it, especially if you have other data and products. It is akin to a 3rd world country selling their raw resources. What makes the most money is the integration of multiple data sources through multiple products and even 3rd party vendors. The magic of an SQL join is that joining table-a and table-b can yield more information that neither a and b had alone. When you join the data of a browser and a search engine and 3rd party information you bought to sell more clickable ads, that is when the most money is made out of the data. The more money you make, the more you can run loss leaders, buy competitors, create barriers of entry (a la app stores), and meanwhile damage the entire ICT ecosystem in the name of even more money. That is why ensuring market health is important. |
And the person to judge that question is the user, not two people having an argument on an Internet site. And not app developers either.
> You claimed if there was such cost, we necessarily would have seen decrease in user demand.
I said that if there is no discernible change in user demand, that means the users, who are the ones in a position to judge, evidently don't see a significant enough cost to change their behavior. Any change in the cost-benefit relationship will change the behavior of some users. Sure, they won't all switch from iPhones to something else, but some percentage of them will.
> Being able to give away things for free come from the giant profits accumulated through monopolistic vertical integration.
No, it comes from having some other source of revenue besides the users of the thing that is being given away for free. "Monopolistic vertical integration" might help in getting other sources of revenue, but it's not the root problem. The root problem is that the actual users of the service are not the paying customers, someone else is, so the incentives of the provider are skewed.