111–120 of 496 posts
I think we’re in a real low point right now. Gmail, AMP, Chrome, Android. So many peoples internet experience is from one place. With Amazon dominating retail, and Facebook under its various brands dominating social media, there isn’t much scope for other players. I don’t see another option than breaking theses companies up at this point.
It does look pretty tragic at this point. But it’s worth noting that every tech business so far was talked about as if it’s taken over the world, forever, and without 5-10-20 years they were overtaken. IBM, Intel, Microsoft. I think google is overplaying their hand in many areas, and this will inevitably lead to the downfall of their dominance. Just like most other large businesses in history.
I'd argue that they tend not to lose on their home turf, but rather the ground moves under them. Google only increased it's hold in the web as Facebook took the new territory of social media. Likewise Microsoft still is a massive player in enterprise software even as AWS became a virtual synonym for cloud computing.
An interesting thing I have noticed is that Amazon has made staggeringly little progress at user facing SaaS -- think salesforce.com. I went to an AWS conference years ago and the gap between the speaker's enthusiasm for zocalo and the crowd that couldn't care less (e.g. The crowd that was pumped for IAM and T2 instances) was striking.
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Amazon is only 4% of the US retail sector though. I wouldn't call that dominant.
Do cars and houses count in that measure?
Walmart is still 2x the size of Amazon in terms of revenue, and like Bezos said in his congressional briefing, it's easier and cheaper to build and online platform than it is to build out Walmart's existing physical retail presence.
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Don't forget that Amazon dominates a lot more than just retail on the internet. With AWS they effectively run large portions of it as well.
They run large portions of it as essentially a gargantuan hosting company, in data centers in a few fixed locations. They buy a lot of dark fiber, and IRUs, and wavelength services from carrier-of-carrier type big ISPs, but by no means do they control the internet. But they are not in the same business of long distance OSI layer 1 ISP operations as CenturyLink/level3, zayo or Verizon are. Where I would be really worr…
I guess that a state owned company would willingly be sold by its owner because states urgently need money.
For example Orange sa (ex France telecom) is owned at 25% by the French state and French state just had passed a budget which is financed at half by debt (2021). Selling a company for $b30 would provide some relief in 2021 budget.
[0] https://www.infrontanalytics.com/fe-en/FR0000133308/Orange-S...
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You could make a case that all the 'social' platforms serve a fundamentally different need than the Web. Those are all more about immediate communication of lots of relatively ephemeral, low-information messages. The Web is more suited to publishing more enduring, long form and complete information. Fusing the two never seems to work well. See blog comments for an example.
You could make a case that most internet platforms are increasingly social. Think about what would be left if you took away all "social" apps from the internet. Even if we don't go that far, think about non-social online apps that don't use the "web". For example, iCloud, Dropbox, Microsoft Office, Adobe creative cloud, etc. Most users of these apps use native apps instead of a clunky browser.
Some people think Microsoft Word is a clunky native app, others that Google Docs is a clunky browser app.
Maybe they are both right.
The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect t…
A lot of talk in this article about Google capturing the whole web, all valid points, but I find the Facebook walled garden even more terrifying. I see people now, often in online school parent groups I'm a part of, etc. who cannot even use email anymore, who don't use web pages at all, they get all their information through Facebook groups and Facebook, and only talk through Facebook messenger or sometimes SMS. E-ma…
Couldn't you have said the same thing 20 years ago and used "AOL" instead? There seems to be a large group of users who consistently fit this trend and the company names just get swapped occasionally
I think we’re in a real low point right now. Gmail, AMP, Chrome, Android. So many peoples internet experience is from one place. With Amazon dominating retail, and Facebook under its various brands dominating social media, there isn’t much scope for other players. I don’t see another option than breaking theses companies up at this point.
Don't forget that Amazon dominates a lot more than just retail on the internet. With AWS they effectively run large portions of it as well.
Google can now dictate which webshop is shown first in search results on a product level.
I know retailers are sick of this. They need Google to be found on the web but they don't like how Google is destroying retail.