An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft

Can't agree really. On the operating system front, it's Linux-only at this point. And the "Linux community" has completed its long way to the dark side, with RedHat paying devs to subvert the portability Unix/POSIX has always stood for, with systemd and the rush to containers. For a perspective, consider Docker was originally a way to equalize distro-specific libs and quirks; RedHat and Kubernetes essentially deprecating Docker (and adding unbelievable amounts of code to replace it as infrastructure) just means a central entity calls the shots now. When the problem of non-uniform libs is entirely created by RedHat and too many distros themselves. In reality, starved core F/OSS packages haven't changed in a decade or more. But enterprise cloud deals are just too sweet, so change for change's sake it is. In that context, it makes sense that RedHat has shutdown CentOS now.

On the web, it's even worse. There are no "browser vendors" except Google and Apple left, and Google is gatekeeping so-called web standards. Recently, HTTP and DNS is up for grabs as well. Hail monopolies.

1) you arent charged if youre a writer, de facto.

2) yes, they provide stuff that costs money if you want to use them (custom subdomains cost a one time fixed cost of $50)

3) you, as a content creator, can choose if you want to enable monetization, at which point the readers must pay to read your content, but still - you arent explicitly charged to post stuff (which is what happens in the Medium model, implicitly).

one thing Substack should do is enable webhooks so that if you are running a webapp and you want to give your paid subscribers access to an 'exclusive blog', you can tell substack that user X with email addr Y is a paid subscriber to MyService ABC, and then instead of requiring payments to Substack, it would just let them through. Not sure how the user/unit economics would work here, but I enabled a Substack blog for a new SaaS I'm building, and I want to make it pay-only, but I'm already using Stripe to handle subscriptions/payments and I don't want my users to have to pay twice in order to see the blog (while already paying for the APIs and services provided by the site.) and also use the service web app as well as the service web API.

@cjbest, @sethbannon, @pg if youre listening I think this would be a good thing to prioritize: webhook to allow subscribers for X's SaaS/startup/whatever to be implicitly include in the set of "paying Substack users" instead of requiring some app's user to pay a second time (for some non-egregious fee, maybe a small percentage of the user subsription fee for X's pricing model. Maybe even Stripe & Substack could chat about a bidirectional integration to make this seamless, and even bake in some of the costs).

if you like these ideas you should totally reach me at the addresses listed on my keybase on my profile, I am super awesome and its 4:24am EST (my location) so clearly I'm motivated.

Cheers

The antitrust way would be to have Outlook have buttons for a lot of different meeting services out of the box. Many don't require installing any software (Google meet for example). It's all just API:s.

A central service where you can easily manage many subscriptions, with integrations into other websites. There are a lot things I would pay for if I didn't have to go through the process of creating and managing yet another account. If it was just a one-click add/remove.

News websites come to mind. I would also use a "buy access to this article for 50 cents" feature. It just has to be frictionless.

The major players might not want to give up the money from people buying subscriptions and not using them much or forgetting to cancel them, but that seems like a lunch ready to be eaten.