Wired Interviews Bill Gates (1996) [video]

They're very close to that. And the same is true to other content, e.g. Spotify, Amazon Kiddle, Netflix for films, YouTube for video, etc.

People still go to other sources, but increasingly less so, and those sources all increasingly fringe (Daring Fireball? Compared to Facebook and the like?). Nothing like the wild west (and much freer and distributed) market it was 10 and 20 years ago.

Between the 3-4 big social aggregators for example, there goes 80% of the internet advertising pie.

Gates (as quoted below): "There will be no content club in my life time with $4 billion revenue...you are on drugs if you think that".

Meanwhile there are like 5 "content clubs" with much higher revenue...

[1] https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...

I don't think many people in your family know the site.

They are entrenched and are not expanding their services, instead, they are digging in and keeping their foothold within their regions, limiting/eliminating competition, both from a rules/laws (like preventing municipal ISPs from forming) and limiting their service footprint to maximize their "profits" within their regions. Next expanding, but always increasing the amount they charge to poor service and access to the "internet."

If anything, it appears that ISP behavior is similar to the original Ma-Bell (USA) telephone Corp. It looks like somebody needs to break them up. But that's wishful thinking this day & age, just like having a nation wide (USA) fiber deploy to all states, cities and towns. Imagine, a Renaissance would develop.

Peace

> I don't think we ever did anything with the interview. I had completely forgotten I had video'ed it.

Yes, I recall those days intimately. It was hysteria and laughable even then. Breathless magazine articles claiming Microsoft was going to dominate everything, set up toll roads on the Internet, dominate e-commerce, publishing, media, and so on. None of it was even remotely feasible or credible.

The fear that briefly surrounded Microsoft's reign was almost entirely baseless hysteria. Its preeminence and monopoly abuse era lasted for six or seven years. Facebook has been abusing US consumers with its social monopoly for longer than that already, as has Google with its search monopoly (they're at least a decade plus in now). Both Facebook and Google are not only drastically more powerful and wealthy (greater financial resources by at least a factor of 10) than Microsoft in 1995-96, their reach is far beyond anything Microsoft had at that time. World-wide PC sales in 1995 were a whopping 70 million.

Google and Facebook touch nearly all corners of the globe, in real-time, at all times. Billions upon billions of people. Microsoft's reach in 1995-96? Extremely slow in nature, and less than ~150 million people globally.

Ability to throw or bias elections and control global commerce? Microsoft had almost none of that type of power with their operating system, or IE. Extraordinary amounts of commercial activity and referral flow directly through Google and Facebook products/platforms each day. Google's algorithm changes have dramatic effects on businesses. Android is a far larger gatekeeper and toll road than Microsoft could have dreamed of in 1995. YouTube by itself is roughly worth as much as all of Microsoft was in March 1995 (and has dramatically greater influence and reach, along with a monopoly position in what it does), Instagram is worth even more.

And Netscape, Microsoft's most famous 'victim'? (although not the thing that really got them in anti-trust trouble) The notion of building a large business around charging for a consumer browser was a dead-end. Nothing that Chrome or any other free browser wouldn't have put an end to later. Netscape was always going to die, short of pulling off a magic in-flight engine change to enterprise software (which they tried and failed at).

There's no chance Microsoft killed off more competitors in those days than Amazon has. How many small and mid size retailers has Amazon put under as it has added $100+ billion to its retail sales? Given the very low consumer & economic growth of the past decade, the tally would have to be thousands of businesses across the US. There are radically more retail stores of all sizes across the US than software companies. It's impossible for Microsoft to ever compete with the business rival destruction that Amazon must inherently cause as it grows ever larger. How many physical stores will Amazon destroy as it adds its next $100 billion in retail sales? It's not detracting from Walmart's sales, that's not shrinking, so it's coming from everybody else.

Interesting to note, Microsoft bought Hotmail for $400 million the following year.

> Apple Music, et al. license content and there are few companies that are able to do this. This creates a barrier to entry that wasn't present for the "content clubs" Gates discusses.

That's not true, because Apple licensing anything is still not a barrier to entry into that market even today. Also, such licensing wasn't available to anybody back then.

> In fact, his primary point is that due to the lack of a barrier to entry in the market and no accumulating advantage of any kind, there wouldn't be a single dominant player.

No, that was another point he made. The fragmentation of the market and he was certainly right on that one.

However, that was still not the point he mad I was talking about, the total size of the market.

Also notice, I didn't inter

Well, we have at best 2-3 "dominant players" in each field, so not much better. And doesn't already Kindle dominate in eBooks? Surely iBooks is not that much of competition.