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Where Warren’s Wrong

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Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#221

Post by scottlegrand2 »

Amazon's cloud service has plenty of competition. No need to antitrust that part in my opinion.

What's hard to disrupt is their amazing logistics network for delivering impulse purchases on the cheap and fast.

But while I have nothing but contempt for sponsored products, enabling Amazon arbitrage like it's eBay, and for deleting keywords to increase the size of search results because that defeats my spearfishing for specific products, it doesn't seem like something someone else couldn't build.

Start by addressing all of the bad customer experiences with counterfeit products, badly shipped items, and lousy customer support. What makes this difficult is that (beyond the challenge of execution itself) I don't think traditional venture-capital would invest in this so you have a chicken and the egg problem that I suspect will never be solved until someone manages to come up with a business model better than Amazon's at a time when Amazon is too large and inefficient to respond properly.

And I think they're getting there. I worked there for six years and left recently. I'm never going back. The culture in my opinion is horrible. And that's a second area where you could do better than Amazon and brain drain them. I'm sure there's more.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#222

Post by JackFr »

When Disney creates a streaming service, are they using their market power to crush Netflix? Or when Netflix promotes their own original content are they using their platform to unfairly compete. When I buy store brand cough syrup, rather than the name brand, am I being harmed? Is the cough syrup manufacturer?

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#223

Post by scarface74 »

tathougies wrote: post #214
scarface74 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No the entire purpose is to make a profit. The most profitable company in the US is Apple. They didn’t get there by chasing market share.

Profit is a function of competition. If Apple had competitors, it would not be able to charge as much as it did for its computers. You argue that Apple does have competition, and that's nominally true if you are very coarse and sloppy with your comparisons, but due to marketing and their walled garden, they are basically a monopoly over the upper / more artistic portions of the market: https://wccftech.com/apple-ipho…

Profit is a function of competition. If Apple had competitors, it would not be able to charge as much as it did for its computers.

Are you really saying that Apple has no competition in computers?

Apple has been competing against commodity PC makers for 40 years.

Or are you saying that Apple doesn’t have competition making MacOS computers? Apple competes with generic PC makers by making a differentiated experience. There was nothing stopping any PC maker from doing the same. It wasn’t like Apple was making massive profits in the late 90s when it bought NeXT and started developing OS X.

You argue that Apple does have competition, and that's nominally true if you are very coarse and sloppy with your comparisons, but due to marketing and their walled garden, they are basically a monopoly over the upper / more artistic portions of the market:

They out competed. Any of the PC manufacturers could have produced a differentiated ecosystem in the 80s or 90s instead of using Microsoft. Apple didn’t have a monopoly on marketing channels.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#224

Post by scarface74 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #216
scarface74 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really think they didn’t set out to dominate mobile, search, the gaming market, etc? You really think they had a strategy meeting and said that their strategy was going to be to always be a strong second?

> You really think they didn’t set out to dominate mobile, search, the gaming market, etc? No, I think they were, at a minimum, more restrained in unlawfully leveraging their existing monopolies to do that thsn they were in the 1990s with the browser, not that they didn't try to dominate those markets.

How were they “more restrained”? They made bing the default search engine for IE. They tried to tightly integrate Windows Mobile with Windows and they tried to make their three failed music initiatives work better with the bundled Windows Media Player.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#225

Post by dragonwriter »

scarface74 wrote: post #223
tathougies wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit is a function of competition. If Apple had competitors, it would not be able to charge as much as it did for its computers. You argue that Apple does have competition, and that's nominally true if you are very coarse and sloppy with your comparisons, but due to marketing and their walled garden, they are basically a monopoly over the upper / more artistic portions of the market: https://wccftech.com/apple-ipho…

Profit is a function of competition. If Apple had competitors, it would not be able to charge as much as it did for its computers. Are you really saying that Apple has no competition in computers ? Apple has been competing against commodity PC makers for 40 years. Or are you saying that Apple doesn’t have competition making MacOS computers? Apple competes with generic PC makers by making a differentiated experience .…

> Are you really saying that Apple has no competition in computers?

They can have no competition for their computers when other people are selling computers. The reason the pricing power standard is used in antitrust is that a intuitively appealing descriptive category may not actually be a domain in which all products are actually considered against each other by purchasers and thus may not actually be a single market within which competition occurs.

> They out competed.

That's usually how younger a monopoly, other than a government grant or leveraging another existing monopoly.

It's not a contradiction to having a monopoly.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#226

Post by AnthonyMouse »

scarface74 wrote: post #215
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making a third party client doesn't require any third party entity to access the data, only third party software -- which it already does. If your friend accesses Facebook via Firefox, Firefox inherently has that data. So does the operating system, the TLS library the browser uses, etc. But it never has to leave your friend's device, and neither would it need to with some different client.

So how do we trust third party software not to be collecting data and sending it back? How does Facebook give access to the customer’s information and ensure that the third party doesn’t abuse it? My browser doesn’t have access to scrape all of my Facebook information and all of my friends FB information.

> So how do we trust third party software not to be collecting data and sending it back?

How do we trust that Chrome or Windows isn't currently?

> How does Facebook give access to the customer’s information and ensure that the third party doesn’t abuse it?

It's the customer giving the software access to the data. Facebook has no more to do with it than gmail has to do with whether you use Thunderbird or Outlook.

> My browser doesn’t have access to scrape all of my Facebook information and all of my friends FB information.

Neither would this need to. It has your Facebook credentials and accesses Facebook as you. No special rights, just the ability to do use Facebook in a consolidated interface without ending up in court.

It couldn't do anything a malicious browser couldn't do with your Facebook cookie.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#227

Post by mech422 »

cm2187 wrote: post #33
chj wrote: post #22

The author is nitpicking. Warren may be wrong about the history of bing and google, but that's not really important. She's 100% right about Amazon, and the author conveniently forgot to mention. Most people in tech industry always strive to build monopoly and dominance. In their eyes, Warren's idea is of course insane. But viewing from another point, in order to protect competition and small businesses, her proposal…

Actually amazon is the one that I would say doesn't have a monopoly. It doesn't have a monopoly in the retail space (far from it), nor in the cloud hosting (let alone server hosting) business, nor in online streaming (music/tv). Google on the other hand has close to a monopoly on search (and browsers). Facebook on social medias.

Amazon is the one that continues to amaze me. People forget the original pitch to investors was _LOSE_ money for 5 years until they either drove competitors out of business, or became the single largest e-commerce provider. I've never understood how this was legal. It seems like the definition of 'anti-competitive' and 'predatory'? If Microsoft gave a free computer with every purchase of windows, and could afford to continue the practice until Apple, Dell, etc. went bankrupt - would that be ok ?

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#228

Post by scarface74 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #207
scarface74 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could download J2ME apps from anywhere. Honestly I used Verizon as an example but thinking back, Sprint’s store was a better example. I think Verizon used something different. Because retail stores have to provide shelf space with real estate cost, unsold inventory cost, etc. How much is that cost to Apple? So now the government should also decide what is a “fair” amount of markup? And it costs 0% to be distribut…

> You could download J2ME apps from anywhere. Honestly I used Verizon as an example but thinking back, Sprint’s store was a better example. I think Verizon used something different. In which case the lesson is that by charging so much in a competitive market, that business unit failed. Which leads to the real point: > So now the government should also decide what is a “fair” amount of markup? It's not a matter of set…

If Apple was charging 30% and there was a competing Mozilla App Store for iOS charging 5%,

There was nothing stopping Mozilla from making a “Firefox phone” and having a fully integrated experience. Well they did try and failed to execute. As did Amazon, Ubuntu, and Facebook.

Apple was nowhere near the behemoth it is today when the iPhone was introduced. A company shouldn’t come under government scrutiny because competitors failed to execute.

If app makers don’t think the trade off is worth it, they are free to only target the other 80% of the phone market.

I guess they think selling loot boxes with Apple taking a 30% cut is worth it. Don’t be mistaken, that is where most money being spent on the App Store is being spent - on in app consumables.

The other major market is subscription to third party services and companies can and do sell those outside of the App Store.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#229

Post by scarface74 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #226
scarface74 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do we trust third party software not to be collecting data and sending it back? How does Facebook give access to the customer’s information and ensure that the third party doesn’t abuse it? My browser doesn’t have access to scrape all of my Facebook information and all of my friends FB information.

> So how do we trust third party software not to be collecting data and sending it back? How do we trust that Chrome or Windows isn't currently? > How does Facebook give access to the customer’s information and ensure that the third party doesn’t abuse it? It's the customer giving the software access to the data. Facebook has no more to do with it than gmail has to do with whether you use Thunderbird or Outlook. > My…

Have you forgotten what happened with Cambridge Analytica?

A “Facebook cookie” doesn’t have all of the information to all my friends information

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#230

Post by opportune »

jmrobertson wrote: post #24

Reading her stuff, it seems like proposals to separate Apple from the App store indicate a total lack of awareness about InfoSec, and at best a poorly researched policy proposal from a technical standpoint. The only reason the App Store isn't a simmering cesspool of malware is that Apple heavily moderates what gets on there, and Google does somewhat the same. That doesn't mean that there perhaps isn't a less MSFT + I…

If Apple releases a secure mobile operating system then allowing apps to be used outside of the official app store is no different from me being able to install whatever software I want on my mac
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