[mangeletti]

In my opinion, GitHub has demonstrated how a good monopoly[1] can operate. They're quick to respond to problems, they act ethically for the most part, their pricing is a far-cry from the type of gouging most monopolies get away with, and their product continues to get better and better. GitHub also makes it easy for new developers to get started with Git, and their UI has many awesome features that keep getting better.

As Peter Thiel would say, because they have a monopoly, they have money to spend on things (e.g., improving their product) other than competing themselves out of business.

All that being said, where is the market gap that AWS seeks to fill, other than hosting of large-sized files (scientific / big data applications, etc.), and perhaps the user management, which I feel is a bit outmoded and cumbersome?

1. I think it's fair to say GitHub has a monopoly on paid Git hosting

[mindcrime]

> 1. I think it's fair to say GitHub has a monopoly on paid Git hosting

I don't know... depends on how precisely you want to define "monopoly". Bitbucket are certainly popular in some circles. We use them here at Mammoth Data, as their pricing model is more economical for what we do.

[kaishiro]

Yeah, this is a fair point. Anecdotally, most of the agencies I've worked with use Bitbucket due to their pricing being based around users as opposed to the number of private repos - the lock-in becomes even tighter if they're running JIRA. Github's private repo limit even on organizational accounts can become constricting pretty quickly.

[fineman]

I don't think the only store in town selling widgets has a widget monopoly unless there's something preventing another store from selling widgets. Until then they're just first-movers.

But I will agree about Github. They had time to build lock-in and didn't.

[mangeletti]

A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity[1], so it doesn't really matter that another provider could join the market.

To be fair, GitHub is really part of an oligopoly, comprised of themselves, BitBucket, and GitLab, but the winner of a majority of market share in this situation is typically referred to as a monopoly, in the same sense that Google is referred to as a monopoly, despite the existence of Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines.

For context, according to Compete, GitHub had 24 times as many unique visits as BitBucket last month. GitLab has about half to one third the traffic of BitBucket.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

[fineman]

From your reference, I think this supports the other meaning:

> The verb "monopolise" refers to the process by which a company gains the ability to raise prices or exclude competitors.

As I see it, without that ability to exclude, it's not a monopoly.

In a market without lock-in, or lock-out depending on your PoV, I can start selling widgets at any time and will do so whenever your profit margin gets too sweet. You're competing against me even if I'm not actively selling yet.