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Re:Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions by cxr on Thursday October 07, 2021 @10:02AM (#28786383)
This is worded like a contradiction or a correction, but that is in fact exactly my point. On offer is the implicit suggestion that Mozilla needs half a billion a year to maintain its current position. But Mozilla's numbers are so low and Barksdale's maxim is well-founded enough that you don't have to take a huge leap in logic to see that that argument doesn't hold up. That it would be possible for a nobody to appear and get the same results means that Mozilla's costs aren't justified.
Re:Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions by pixelgeek on Thursday October 07, 2021 @10:53AM (#28787084)
The two things are different though.

Maintaining a position is not the same as building a position. If Barksdale is right then the existing players in a market need to work to ensure that they can't lose market share from new entrants.

Re:Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions by cxr on Thursday October 07, 2021 @12:38PM (#28788714)
You're not following the implication all the way through.

If a player M controls some "share" in the game and an independent contender C can appear and match M's current share on <1/10 M's current costs, then M's costs to maintain its position relative to all others are not greater than C's costs. If M₀ is M's current offering, then M can carve out part of its budget to fund the entry of their own, controlled Cₘ, independent of M₀, and when Cₘ reaches maturity and matches M's share from M₀ alone, they can let M₀ die—or keep both M₀ and Cₘ around, having advanced their take with greater efficiency than all the costs it would have required to make the same gains with M₀ alone. This assumes that the share from Cₘ comes entirely from those competing with M. This won't be the case; M₀ itself will suffer. But even in the worst case scenario, the share from Cₘ can come entirely from eroding the share of M₀, i.e., a simple transfer. This also won't happen. However, even in the event that it does happen, it's still a net win for M, having used Cₘ to cut their costs by >90% under the regime with M₀.