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lapcatyesterday at 10:52 PM2 repliesview on HN

I believe Gruber's view is that the market forces in question are between iPhone and competing smartphones.


Replies

snackbrokenyesterday at 11:27 PM

Market forces are not effective at creating good outcomes when there is an oligopoly.

If there are two producers each with ~50% market share, it's not profitable for one of them to improve their product such that they capture an additional 5% of the market but reduces the profit margin of their product by 10%. If there are 50 producers each with ~2% market share, one of them would happily capture 5% of the market (more than doubling the size of their business!) by sacrificing 10% of their profit margin.

In the Google-Apple duopoly it's much more profitable to engage in tacit collusion than it is to defect.

jgruberyesterday at 11:42 PM

No. It’s broader than that. The market forces are the entire realm of what’s possible, now and in the future. When Windows seemed entrenched forever, the platforms that eventually surpassed weren’t the competing desktop OSes (Mac and Linux). It was the web first, in the late 1990s-2000s, then mobile (iPhone and Android) in the 2010s.

Necessity really is the mother of invention, and the more we need something new, the sooner someone will invent it. But it will look no more like an iPhone than the iPhone looked like a PC.

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