511–520 of 545 posts
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I know if walmart moved into a new city and started giving away hardware for free, then waited until all the local hardware stores had been shut down for 10 months, and then jacked up their prices to 100 times what they used to be before going free, that'd be pretty illegal. This is what drug dealers do. It was also the plot of the James Bond film Live and Let Die .
Are you saying drug dealers go around giving their product for free until no competition or we are hooked? I don't really think that happens at all. If so where are they?
That's not too say that there's guys on street corners offering free drugs to random passersby. Rather there's lots of dealers who just deal to aquaintances, friends, friends of friends, neighbors, etc. In that case they can spread a few hundred dollars worth of product around to non-users within their social network in hopes of picking up another client or two, who will end up generating reliable profit for a long time.
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Which most likely meant the startup was a feature or a product, not a company with a viable business model.
If it wasn't a viable business model, Google wouldn't move into the space. It's just that they first use their infinite pocket money to kill off all the competition, then switch to making money.
Wrong, maybe that "space" (feature or product) goes well with Google's business model, but wouldn't support a viable business mode by itself.
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Which most likely meant the startup was a feature or a product, not a company with a viable business model.
Gmail is free. Does that mean email service is not a product? Why does fastmail exist?
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Which most likely meant the startup was a feature or a product, not a company with a viable business model.
Being bought/aquihired by Google/others seems to be a business model several companies aim for.
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Please contact the US Department of Justice and let them know about how the price increase is affecting you in regards to Street View. They seemed to buy into my reasoning that Google has effectively made sure that they won't have any Street View competition by artificially keeping prices low for years. The more people that complain, the sooner the DOJ will probably take action. For European users I recommend complai…
>They seemed to buy into my reasoning We're going to need a bit more detail from an account that clearly has an agenda.
Edit: If you meant that you wanted more detail about my antitrust complaint, I contacted them via the antitrust email address. They took a while to call back, but not as long as Google took to get me that Maps quote...
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Possibly not. HN sits behind Cloudflare. Your SSL connection terminates at Cloudflare to plaintext, and new SSL connection to HN is created. Your login and password, IP and User-Agent and other bits, are in cleartext to Cloudflare. Much less likely if you have VPN, did not give email and made random login/password. OPSec.
What are you trying to say? Cloudflare doesn't give you any more privacy. In the highly hypothetical case that someone would actually investigate this they'd get this IP from HN's host or Cloudflare, then get their identity and then go forward with removing him from the bar association if found guilty.
VPN case. I logged in HN and gave legal advice :) Minute later I logged in Reddit, same IP, same browser, probably tracking cookies too (Reddit is behind CF too). Now CF can link my HN and Reddit logins. Chances are, I logged into Reddit without VPN days ago - IP - Busted. Not so hypothetical, imho.
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> When Google first launched Maps it was free and they ran all of the other competition out of business. Now that all their competition are dead they want to charge for it. Were there any significant competing maps APIs for the web in 2005? There may have been (and you seem so certain I'm sure you could name them all :P), but it's crazy to claim that there aren't far more competitors in the last 5 years than there we…
> Were there any significant competing maps APIs for the web in 2005? Don't forget about services beyond providing Maps APIs. Google Maps basically killed the need for a standalone GPS purchase (Garmin/TomTom) as well as purchasing upgraded maps for existing GPS systems, including those built into a car. Am I complaining? No, but Google gave away for free something that once would've been hundreds of dollars in softw…
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>Also, this isn’t the first time Google is doing this bait and switch. It isn't a bait and switch. It's introductory pricing. They attracted developers and businesses to a product people essentially weren't using, they let people work with it at or near a loss and now that they have a customer base they are trying to make it profitable. Yes, they'll lose some of their users that want a free ride. They'll also retain…
You seem to have read an entirely different story. The customer Google is losing here is clearly willing to pay, not expecting a free ride. And there is absolutely no similarity between your MailChimp example and what Google has done in this case. The customer didn't complain about costs rising as the number of users starts to exceed an existing threshold. That said, I wouldn't be so quick to call for the regulator.…
Yet they spend the entire post whining about it.
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Google+ only existed in the first place because of the thing that was killing the medium and its one hundred and forty character-limited cousin.
As I look at the big list of RSS feeds I found this very thread in, I can't help but imagine that news of it's death is a tad exaggerated.