| I think streaming services is an invalid example, because their value is their catalog. Perhaps it was different at the dawn of Netflix but now they mostly sell series and movies, not a web service for accessing series and movies. All actual services are interchangeable, or should be—and if not then there is network effect and/or user lock-in due to double-sided market malpractice. In all other cases there is a niche ripe for a competitor to come in and profit! > increased utilization of the core service may be canceled out by reduction in the flood of requests their bloated GUI generates I think in most cases a swarm of automated requests to core service would outweigh overhead from a front-end GUI, architecture must be really mismanaged otherwise. > You ain't gonna "vote with your wallet". Hardly anyone does. And you're just one user of a hundred thousand, or a million - a rounding error. Why not? This is a defeatist attitude that either ignores how markets work or assumes users are ignorant and never learn. People do vote with their wallets. Once bitten, you choose services with full export functionality, start reading ToS and looking at who runs it. Word of mouth helps people make better decisions and pick better vendors, even if those vendors are more expensive. (The only problematic ones are “free” vendors, for a customer making a jump from 0 to N is much more difficult than from N to M. So we’re back to ad-supported double-sided markets ruining everything.) And yes, there is information asymmetry, but there is also regulation that could compensate for it. For example, the government could require services larger than certain size to provide fully featured APIs. |