Big Tech Monopolies

There is no barrier to entry. But there is a huge barrier to grow and establish something new. Whatever a smaller competitor comes up with Facebook can quickly copy and dominate the market just by sheer size. There is a reason why so many startups get acquihired by one of the big companies and shut down their product instead of establishing themselves on the market.

Google and FB each killed off earlier competitors who had similar spigots. The idea that you can simply discover an "infinite money spigot" once, sit back, and reap the rewards from it forever, is not borne out by anything in humanity's history.

That Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and other tech giants have become so big, is because competition is not always possible and free-markets do not regulate themselves. How can anyone compete with Amazon in its present form with hundreds of giant distribution centres worldwide? How can I create a competitor to Facebook and get even one person interested, if the other one billion are still on Facebook? How can I produce a competitor for the iPhone and get millions of apps ported?

This is HN, the Church of the Free Market is well represented. If you haven't yet seen someone give the "free markets create competition" speech on Monday and the "my company aims to capture this space and then entrench a monopoly with economies of scale / network effects / platform effects / two sided markets / last mile dynamics" pitch on Tuesday, just hang around HN a bit more. You won't have to wait long.

Agree to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28995247The shutdowns will happen so long as 1) there's not enough market share for the competing product (presumably from the network effects) and 2) there's market suppression from the current players. In other words: as long as there is a competing first-landing player and that player is actively working against any newcomers

Makes you wonder how much first mover advantage really matters.

They'll pay for it when more startups catch on and grow like mad and compete with them

It's the circle of life:1) Established players are all overpriced and focus on value extraction, not customer service2) By actually helping your customers and providing good solutions at an affordable price, you can quickly grow to be a big player in the space3) Now that we are a big player, we could be making big bugs by squeezing the customers who can't easily switch away4) Established players are all overpriced and focus on value extraction, not customer service

Are you sure nobody can have the whole pie? Some domains have significant network effects, which work to prevent competitors from developing a useful service. E.g. eBay.

Sounds like businesses can't compete running on or off these platforms. Which could stifle competition. Why start a business if one of the few, enormous players can just step in and crush it with network effects or preferential pricing.