> The steam roller is still there from quite a few companies

It never left, it will never not exist.

Amazon is presently crushing the old-line retail industry in a manner that is little different from what any number of giants in the past did to the competition, whether Walmart or Sears before it.

In the days of Sears, you got a big catalog every so often. It had everything. You could go to the Sears store and it would probably have it in stock. I remember that's where you bought Boy Scout uniforms some 30 years ago... and the necessary basic patches.

Last time I went to Sears, I was looking for some good working outside pants. The store had an odor of perfume. Most of the clothes were for women. The size of pants I wanted was sold out with no idea of when it would be in stock.

So I went over to Target. They didn't have any good working pants. They might get some in the next shipment in a week or so. I went over to REI... and the pants were a bit too expensive for what I was after. I ended up at Duluth trading... the outlet a good half hour drive away from where I am now.

If I was living back up in the north woods where it was more than a half hour drive? I probably would have ordered online and probably from Amazon. Sure, Cabela's has same day shipping to a store, but at my previous residence, the nearest store was an hour and a half away... and shipping on one pair is %20 of the cost of the pants.

There was a sears in the town where I lived up north... but Amazon hasn't killed Sears. Sears has been committing a slow suicide for decades with poor availability and service. Other stores with an online presence still have what I would consider exorbitant shipping costs.

Don't blame Amazon for picking up the customers of the once mighty Sears mail-order empire - they didn't get their catalog online fast enough and ignored that silly Seattle company selling books for far too long.

I don't see it as Amazon being aggressive at undercutting competitors or vaporware them in the way that Microsoft was in its day (Competitor A announces a product... Microsoft announces they're going to do it too - everyone waits for Microsoft to come out with it while Competitor A's product withers on the vine). Amazon has a product and a focus, and they're doing a better job of it than other companies are.

First they offer to buy it.

If you aren’t insane you sell it.

If you think you can beat the big three you probably deserve to be crushed.

>If you think you can beat the big three you probably deserve to be crushed.

vs

> If you think you can beat the big three I cheer you on.

Its funny, that on HN of all places, your statement is not challenged. The major point of HN over /. was the startup/incubatorish habits of Ycombinator.

HN attitude is about getting the big payout, Slashdot was much more "fuck the man". I think it's part of a larger trend, in the Slashdot prime we had protests like the battle of Seattle against globalisation, the hardcore left from that era would be cheering trumps trade policy, but offshoring didn't work out so we collectively sold out.

That's why as a user I tend to consider the license of software I use and sometimes even the legal status of the entity behind it.

By no means my statement implies that software developed under a free software license by a nonprofit organisation will for ever keep being fit for my use case scenarios but I do believe that changes that constitute planned obsolescence wouldn't be the case.

Of course such a model has limitations, you can't go on funding rounds but still it's an interesting model.