[mmx1]

This is a good take. Also hints at why Peter Thiel's thesis on tech monopolies in a dynamic world is correct; i.e. that they aren't necessarily bad. A lot of the value in big tech comes from scale and integration and is inherently not sensible to have a thousand mom and pop shops do it and keep the same value. To the extent that Google is doing anything nefarious as a monopoly with integration, any other company who is willing to value Chrome at any significant price is inevitably going to need a scaled product to tie this to and accomplish what Google did with Chrome. They cannot pull this off on their own even though the open-source Chromium exists, because Google is actually better than them at maintaining a browser ecosystem. I am certain they will do a worse job at owning Chrome, especially considering Google has shown a good faith effort in shipping a browser and keeping the engine open source.

Ironically, this whole saga is happening at the same time the "Google search business is under attack" is at its peak in the news media.

[esafak]

Thiel speaks from the perspective of the monopolist, pithily condensed to 'competition is for losers'. Any product involves a set of trade-offs, and decisions. It is not a law of nature that the monopoly product makes trade-offs everyone, or even anyone, is happy with: people could identify ways the product could be improved. But under a monopoly they can't vote with their wallets. Consider Microsoft in the 80s and 90s. They were, realistically speaking, the only game in town. What efficiency did their monopoly help achieve, and why did it justify the stifling of choice? Maximizing efficiency is a more tenable argument when the product is undifferentiated, which is not the case in technology.

[mmx1]

The point is precisely that being super fixated on Microsoft as a monopoly producing relatively trash-quality products is a static worldview. It is the case that Microsoft monopoly did not in any shape or form preclude a measly search startup and a beleaguered Cupertino company from surpassing it to the slightest (mind you, Windows is still the dominant desktop OS, which compared to what it meant in the 90s is immaterial; people rarely think about writing Windows apps anymore: they write web, iOS and Android apps.) This is the whole point of Thiel's thesis. The contemporary version of this world transition we are witnessing is from search to chatbot. Meanwhile Microsoft by pushing the "trash" products actually served the industry at large well in other ways: it provided a consistent standard base to widely deploy PCs and applications.

Aside: the "competition is for losers" tagline is not from Thiel himself: apparently the publisher came up with a punchy line, and I think that refers to his broader ideology. What I brought up is a very specific observation in his thesis that high margin monopolies are actually good from the perspective of society in a dynamic world where it does not merely translate rent-seeking long-term.

[esafak]

Apple and Google succeeded not by beating Microsoft at its game, but by playing a different game, which happened due to technological revolutions they capitalized on. Apple has a fair claim to partially engendering some of the revolutions; esp. mobile computing. As you said, Window is still the dominant desktop operating system. Who knows what better operating systems people could have been using all this time?

[aylmao]

> A lot of the value in big tech comes from scale and integration and is inherently not sensible to have a thousand mom and pop shops do it and keep the same value.

Some of the most impactful large-scale tech that exist today isn't centralized or monopolized. The internet, for example, or email. There's been a long history of "email killers", but no company has been able to replace email yet. One can achieve integration with standardization, and scale through federation.

In fact, I'd say federation scales better than centralization. In spite of appearances, mom and pop shops scale fantastically. Having thousands of independent actors servicing a market makes an industry much more dynamic and resilient. It's why the biggest restaurants are franchises, for example.

I'd add that the period of greatest innovation in the web wasn't 2004 when IE had 95% of the market, or today when Chrome has 65%. Id argue it was that 2008-2018 decade; an era that also saw the most browser variety we've seen recently.

> any other company who is willing to value Chrome at any significant price is inevitably going to need a scaled product to tie this to and accomplish what Google did with Chrome

Chrome could well be an independent company, like Mozilla is. There's plenty of money to be made in being the middle-man for search engines.

[techpineapple]

"Also hints at why Peter Thiel's thesis on tech monopolies in a dynamic world is correct; i.e. that they aren't necessarily bad. A lot of the value in big tech comes from scale and integration and is inherently not sensible to have a thousand mom and pop shops do it and keep the same value".

Isn't this broadly speaking true about everything, or maybe any luxury service? I guess I would say, that I disagree, I'm not saying you're explicitly wrong, but I think a model where one system or service dominates is a tradeoff. Sure it's more efficient, and maybe you can say "we solved the phone/browser/Operating System/etc" but you lose the world where we had all sorts of weird innovative products.

I mean come on, look at that phone!

https://www.techwalls.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/nokia-n...

[mmx1]

I’d say the point is more subtle than that: it is not mere efficiency that comes with such scale. Rather, such scale is necessary to enable certain technological investments and long-term risks and behavior. For example, if you were a non-monopoly company in a competitive environment you would not be able to steer Chrome and shape it the way it is. You’d be burdened by day to day business needs to keep the margin from eroding below zero at any given corner.

Under this theory it follows that if you actively kill any business with a monopoly market share like the EU, you’ll guarantee failure for the society in achieving certain technological breakthroughs. The only way to avoid it would be government sanctioned corporations (CCP style) or US style pre-Lina Khan relatively free market approach to scale.