[ItsMonkk]

pg has a great article on AirBnB bootstrapping their business by doing things that don't scale. He says that they would go door to door and early on would take pictures of the rooms so that their on-boarding was easier. What I have come to realize is that all businesses do things that don't scale, and not just during the bootstrap process.

Open Source software scales perfectly, and therefore is worthless.

The naive public view of Google is that they are a Search company. The HN take is that Google is not a Search company, they are what they make their money in, which is Advertising. My claim in this comment is a company is whatever they do that doesn't scale. Google is a tracking company. They use that tracking to produce better search results, which they monetize by selling advertising.

It's the tracking that doesn't scale well. And Google knows this, and that's why their Search results punish slow loading pages. They want their tracker(which loads slowly) to be the only tracker. If all sites puts 25 different trackers all with their different stacks on a website, they would lose their 'doesn't scale' property. They then push this even further, by taking control of your browser with Chrome and your device with Android, which also doesn't scale. The market will never allow 100 browsers or 100 mobile operating systems. Developers Developers Developers after all.

So we can see that every company is what the things they do that don't scale. Once they have that, they constrain it and hold it within their walled garden, and from there they can bring in Open Source software. In essence Open Source Software allows the area of the garden to grow. Once OSS grows to being able to do anything that it can possibly do, we will still be constrained to the things that don't scale. These things will allow the companies to enforce monopoly rents within their walled gardens.