> Winners in the tech industry turn into giants via vertical integration and predatory pricing. They keep adding stuff related to the segment they first won in. They keep making stuff cheap or free to undercut competitors.
> There are many examples of this and we have two big examples in the US of anti-trust regulators stepping in and hobbling the giant: IBM in the 60s/70s and Microsoft in the 90s/00s.
If IBM was really a vertically-integrated, predatory giant, how could Microsoft have been successful?
If Microsoft was a vertically integrated, predatory giant, how could Google have been successful?
The only sensible answer is that the incumbents were not as powerful as they seemed to be.
> You could also argue that making things free is good for consumers. You'd be right again, except in the case where the freebies are designed to kill off competition and stagnate the product category (Internet Explorer being a classic case where Microsoft bundled it, gave it away for free, then stopped improving it for years
And yet Internet Explorer was beaten by Firefox and Chrome. So clearly the market works just fine, otherwise we'd still be stuck with IE.
> We have 50 years of precedents and the people at the DOJ know their history. I suspect it's just a matter of political winds and timing before Alphabet has to follow in IBM and Microsoft's footsteps.
Yeah, they will. They will be beaten by new companies that they, and the government, did not see coming. That is my point.