> A monopoly is not inherently bad. They often benefit users with increased efficiency and productivity. They're only bad when progress stagnates and/or prices rise.

My argument is every single monopoly eventually becomes 'bad' and makes progress stagnate and prices rise.

Just look at Google and Amazon. Up until I'd say late-ish 00s, nearly everyone loved Google and Amazon. I remember when Google search, GMail, Maps, street view, etc. first came out. I loved them, and I felt they were so much better than the competition. Same thing with Amazon - their selection was huge, great delivery and customer service.

I still use Google and Amazon for so much, but it's usually with reluctance and distaste. Check out Google search results these days. The ENTIRE first page about half way past the fold is ads, or AMP carousels, or shit I just want to get out of my way. But I still use them because with their heft and scale no one does long tail searches as comprehensively.

I hate to point this out on HN but it does seem relevant. If you dislike Google's use of ads, why not block them?

I think you've acknowledged that Google and Amazon provide the best services of their respective classes. Can we find a way to maintain that high standard without the crud that comes with it?

I'm still not convinced someone couldn't build a better gmail.

The web app is bloated and slow. The ads. The awkward design. Privacy issues. There's a bunch of benefits someone could offer. Fastmail tried but I still think it could be better and not based in Australia where privacy has been eroded.

The barrier to entry for doing categorization, spam detection, search, autosuggestions, and even complex JS frontends is significantly lower than it's ever been. You could even offload some of the above challenges to the client with prepackaged ML models. The spam filtering stuff could even be open sourced and community run like Adblockers. Abuse could still be handled server side.

I agree that Fastmail's location is problematic, but other than that, I would argue it is a better Gmail already, features-wise.

Now that you mention it maps hasn't really improved since streetview. Search is worse. Gmail hasn't really changed much. I guess after it's launched new features are too difficult to add for google.

What? All of these products probably have a miles long changelog.

I mean, I can assume you don't care for the change, but it's there. Streetview was launched in 2007.

Did they not see Google Maps change to a globe late last year? Revolutionary! Take that Flat Earthers!

I mean, in the end it is just a map. If it works, don’t break it.

However just recently they added an AR navigation to the mobile apps.

It’s still Mercator on mobile (iOS at least). How hard is it to push this change?

Recommend taking a look at this blog post: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat the author has updated a couple times. The changes are subtle and are amazing for your benefit. Not seeing the change is them getting better at easing you into the new functionality, not them stagnating.

Building new stuff is always more attractive to engineers than maintaining and incrementally improving existing stuff. Google suffers from this problem somewhat worse than most companies, where its best engineers jump to new projects and the existing products languish because it's not attractive to work on.

The Apple Maps 'street view' equivalent (coming in iOS 13) has a transition animation (for moving down the street) that absolutely knocks the socks off Google's. It was surprising to see just how strikingly better it is. I don't think Google changed it in that time.

How about the AR navigation on phones?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/08/google-maps-ar-navig...

In what real scenario do you see a monopoly not doing exactly what monopolies do? Do they have some moral code they can't break? Do they hate money? What exactly is it that would make them immune to human tendencies?

Monopolies are subject to the laws of economics.

GitHub has gained near-monopoly status because it has provided a superior user experience at a great price. If either of those value propositions start to crumble,

  git remote add ...

Exploitative monopolies almost always have help from the state: The Patent Office, Interstate Commerce Commission, Federal Reserve, FDA, etc either grant monopoly or cartel privilege to their customers. Monopolies achieved on the market cannot be sustained without continuing to satisfy customer demands.

The point I think is that as GitHub adds more and more integrations (git + issues + fork graph + CI/CI + ...) then it's not so simple to move to another service. The vertical is more convenient until you realize you're an Oracle customer all over again.

With CI, I wonder if someone could build a tool which had some sort of DSL to define your CI pipeline, and then translated that to configuration files for multiple CI providers (Travis CI, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, etc.) If you write all your CI pipelines in that DSL, then moving to another provider would be just telling the tool to generate output for another backend.

(One issue is that such a DSL could only provide lowest common denominator functionality... or else, suppose CI providers 1 and 2 offer feature X but 3 and 4 don't, then if you use feature X, you can switch between 1 and 2, but the tool would give an "unsupported feature" error if you tried to generate output for 3 or 4.)

Having migrated from Travis to CircleCI for most of my active projects, I’d say their models are so vastly different it’s pretty much impossible to have an AST of sort that can be translated to both except for the simplest and most well-encapsulated cases (at least not before Travis supposedly improved Docker support, by which point I was already gone).

there is, oddly perhaps, an R package of all things that does this: https://github.com/ropenscilabs/tic

I personally find it almost scarily ambitious and am a bit skeptical because of the medium-term maintenance load.

Basically everyone I talk to despises Facebook, which gets pretty much no help from the state, but they still use it because there are no real alternatives.

My argument is that technological platforms are pretty special when it comes to monopoly power because their lock in/switching costs are so high that they can last long after they've stagnated in terms of innovation.

And they just buy up all their competition.

There are tons of alternatives just none that your friends are on.

Surprised no one has taken facebook's launch strategy. Only allow it in one school. Then only ivy league colleges. Then all colleges. Then everyone. Also allow you to import in your email contacts on signup.

That strategy created press / word of mouth and kept it youthful until they were ready for the big launch.

Facebook is different. Your friends are the product, not the tech. With Github the tech is the product.

Github is an example.

It's been less than a year since the MS acquisition. Give it time.

Microsoft is an even better example of a massive company continually competing. Their dev/tech products and tools have gotten magnitudes better in recent years.

Huh? MS is the perfect example of how monopolies cause things to stagnate. It was only when new technology paradigms allowed for the growth of companies like Google and Amazon (wrt AWS) did MS turn around.

IE stagnated for years after MS killed Netscape. No company has really ever challenged Windows on desktop PCs. It was only when new platforms like the Internet and mobile computing came along that provided space for upstarts did MS start competing again.

Sure, but that's the example of monopolies facing competition when they turn bad. Sometimes that takes a new platform shift, other times its just a better product, but either way if there's new value then the monopoly breaks down.

I think if anything, the problem today is companies that could be challengers just end up selling to the very incumbent they're competing against.

In the instances you’ve described where “monopolies” haven’t dominated the market, they were not actually monopolies because they didn’t have total ownership of the market.

A company can be a tech giant and still not be classed as a monopoly. Which are the kind of examples you’re think of.

For those that lived through the Windows 9x desktop monopoly in the 90s, the Internet Explorer monopoly, etc, they will see Microsoft as a prime example of how monopolies are terrible.

In fact the few areas where you actually see Microsoft improve things are in areas where they have experience but don’t actually have a monopoly (eg IDEs).

this is where the Valve vs Epic argument gets interesting as Valve has consistently been pro-consumer, so i have no problem with them being a monopoly.

Epic appears to be firmly pro-developer, which no matter what Tim Sweeney says isn't currently translating into an improved consumer experience.

Being pro-developer in the long term might result in better consumer experience.

Being too pro-consumer on the other hand... well, that gives you mobile gaming with heavy focus on free-to-play and plenty of ads.

Be careful what you wish for :)

Valve are not a monopoly. Steam's competition is not Epic, it is piracy.

Also Origin