Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
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Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
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Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#2Yup. That’s why I feel a little bit uncomfortable being their customer. You can tell their end goal is to become the e-commerce platform for everyone. It might sound great for customers until they aren’t.
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#3This is true of basically all platforms, including every major cloud provider.
AWS's playbook can be described as: 1. Provide low level infra 2. Observe what customers build on it 3. Create a general solution and charge a premium for it 4. Repeat, moving higher up the stack.
Not to mention Amazon.com's "Basics" playbook of finding what sells, then knocking it off, releasing their own version (and ranking it higher for search).
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#4As developers it's easy to look at these things and think "wait, that's my job".
Except... it isn't. If these things can be abstracted away, made easier... that's good. That's what we strive for. You don't have to be the millionth dev to develop invoices or shopping carts. That's wasted effort imo.
These things becoming available as a service frees us up to solve more interesting problems. If devs 20 years from now still have to put deep thought into invoicing for ecommerce after we've already spent millions of hours on the problem, that would be a failure of the industry.
So I guess I disagree with the other commenters and hope software service providers continue to expand their offerings to meet my technical and business needs.
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#5It's a systemic problem. The issue is that people need platforms and that need supports the monopolistic rent-seeking etc.
The solution is going to be decentralized protocols.
In Stripe's case, wide deployment of scalable cryptocurrency will make their business obsolete.
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#6Don’t worry Chamath doesn’t work at Stripe so we’ll be good.
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#7Square does most of these things too, and Square Capital existed years before Stripe Capital. Stripe provides servers to SMBs. It's likely that a lot of them want a simple, bundled solution versus a large enterprise using Adyen along with a different provider for invoices, etc.
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#8I feel like its inevitable to grow most businesses in which they are structured from outside investment. Outliers here may be Microsoft And Apple, but they swallowed nascent markets that were either just underway or they had major capital to spend their way aggressively toward the top of the heap (Apple, with the Macintosh and later the iPhone, Microsoft with Office / Windows and now Azure)
Most other platforms struggle to stay platforms because the profits and/or growth slows or flatlines. Facebook has had massive growth since dumping any platform focus that they used to have, in terms of revenue. They instead made strategic investments so they have a near iron lock on the market in which they exist, all while burning the platform from a provider side.
It hard to be a platform and remain true to core values when there is outside investor pressure. I sure hope this never befalls a company like Cloudflare (which has so far remained a platform), but we shall see as time goes on.
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#9It's a systemic problem. The issue is that people need platforms and that need supports the monopolistic rent-seeking etc. The solution is going to be decentralized protocols. In Stripe's case, wide deployment of scalable cryptocurrency will make their business obsolete.
Wide deployment of a scalable and useful crypto will make a lot of things obsolete.
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#10It's a systemic problem. The issue is that people need platforms and that need supports the monopolistic rent-seeking etc. The solution is going to be decentralized protocols. In Stripe's case, wide deployment of scalable cryptocurrency will make their business obsolete.
While I think this would be great, is there any example of this in the real world? I can't think of anything that is gaining even a minutia of traction that is like this.
And I'm not going to count people hoping the technology catches up with the ideals here.