> also control the infrastructure running a huge portion of the internet
AWS has less market share than Microsoft. The Cloud is a pretty competitive space.
> are working on creating a new ISP
This is great, look what Google Fiber did to fiber availability in the US. More competition is great in this space.
I find it ironic that you're complaining about FAANGs in the context of ISPs, who control literal monopolies in several regions.
Dumb question. Why do people use inflation? Like Rockefeller would take the cash and put in a %2.5 account for 100 years? He probably would have put it in an investment at minimum gaining %7-10 account for 100 years - giving him multiple trillions.
Because it is very hard to think about the currency values in terms of purchasing power.
Inflation is the lowest metric in that count, but reflects a somewhat uniform drop in purchasing power (per dollar) across the whole market.
My friend's mom told me her mortgage for a Bay Area house was 75$ a month, the two cars parked in front were worth more than a 2 bed house when she got the cars.
So it was much cheaper to buy a house, but much more expensive to get a car and I can't even have a ballpark figure for what a gigabyte of computer memory would have cost in 1971.
So, inflation adjustment is at best a rough proxy for purchasing power at current costs.
A common refrain is that Carnegie Hall only cost $1M ($29,581,868.13 when adjusted for inflation) to build, so why do we still credit its founder with their name? Shouldn't we rename it in honor of someone who's contributed more to the Hall?
What this doesn't take into account is what it would cost to _build_ a new Carnegie Hall today. Labor is far more expensive (highest $/hr ever in 2019 if I'm not mistaken [1]) today and so are building materials [2].
So it's true he'd see compounding returns from investing, but to do what they did back then would cost significantly more today. IE, their dollars took them further back then.
Also, worth noting Rockefeller donated 6% of his salary to charity every pay check every single year of his life, not just when he could "afford" it [3]. So if you take into account the _missed_ compound returns of those charitable contributions, you can start to get a sense for just otherworldly their charitable efforts were.
Not trying to say these guys were angels. And yet, as rich as they were, I think too often that overshadows the gargantuan contributions to charity they made.
[1](https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/02/are-wages-increasing...) [2](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/consumer-price-in...) [3](https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/people/hall-o...)
Is it really such a great thing to give away money you don't need. IMO tha should be the absolute minimum baseline expectation for someone who controls so much wealth.
They didn't say a "majority" though, they just said a huge portion.
In the context of the internet and how many devices are out there, I think he would absolutely be right in saying "a huge portion."
According to gartner[0] AWS has over double Azure’s market share by revenue.
What metric are you using for your stat?
[0] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-06-2...
FAANG is huge and market caps already greatly exceed that of the old-school monopolies.
Also, at it's peak Standard Oil was worth about 6% of the US stock market. Apple is currently worth 5.3%. This comparison should be robust to differences in interest rates. In this light, Apple is slightly smaller than Standard Oil was. But, the market is broader now and there are more lines of business in existence. So a company that dominates an entire line of business would be expected to have a lower proportion of total stock market cap now than in 1910.
At the very least 2021 Apple and 1910 Standard Oil are very comparable in size. There might not be a clear way to tell which is bigger.
Walmart meanwhile does also have a marketplace, but I think still sells the overwhelming majority of their stuff direct in their physical stores.
Remember Walmart has revenue of like 600 billion a year or something crazy.
At most, starlink can replace one tmobile.
amz seem to be buying into everything under the sun and trumpling usage agreements (i.e. "reselling" consumer broadband with people joining via dark-patterns despite it being against their ISP terms of service, via amz sidewalk product)... and that can scale up to O.G. Bell levels of monopoly.
Other than Kuiper, Amazon has shown no signs of becoming a serious player in the consumer ISP space. Sidewalk is not a consumer ISP service in its own right, it needs to piggyback on a third-party consumer ISP service. Amazon is nowhere near becoming anything resembling Bell.
Capacity would be aggregate bandwidth, which is determined by the satellite's communications technology (number of transponders, spectrum allocated, modulation used, etc) rather than directly by which orbit it is in.
Comparing constellation sizes does make sense in determining total capacity (aggregate bandwidth of the constellation) assuming that Starlink and Kuiper use similar capacity satellites. I think that is a reasonable assumption, but we have limited info on what Kuiper are planning. Current Starlink satellites have on average 20 GBps capacity each. I can't find any public info on the planned capacity of Kuiper's satellites. Even if Kuiper has higher bandwidth satellites, they'd need a fourfold advantage in bandwidth to overcome Starlink's fourfold advantage in satellite count. And SpaceX is likely to increase the capacity of Starlink in future iterations, so even if Kuiper did have such a bandwidth advantage, it might not last.
The satellite capability is one thing, but spectrum is another. SpaceX doesn't have priority on a lot of the spectrum they have, so it might be completely unusable by the time they go live.
I feel like we are arguing two different things. I was saying Kuiper can't beat Starlink. You are arguing Starlink is not going to succeed. I'm more optimistic about its prospects than you are, but even if you are right, it wouldn't change my original point – if both fail, then Kuiper still doesn't beat Starlink.
Blue Origin is two years older than SpaceX, and yet has achieved far less than SpaceX has in the same timeframe despite a two year head start. Over that timeframe, SpaceX has successfully delivered 124 Falcon 9 payloads to orbit. Blue Origin hasn't sent anything to orbit yet, New Glenn is targeted to "late 2022" but most observers think it won't launch until 2023 (or even later).
Blue Origin is the one that needs to prove itself here. SpaceX has a proven capacity to deliver payload to orbit. With Starship, that capacity is going to greatly increase. But even if Starship runs into trouble and gets delayed, they still have a proven capacity with Falcon 9 to rely on while any issues with Starship gets delayed. Blue Origin is working through the issues on New Glenn without any fallback.
But to be clear, none of this matters. The business case to sell a $1000 terminal for under $300 isn't closing. They're subsidized right now, and public perception will be very different once the real sticker shock comes in.
Is Blue Origin good at its goals? On New Glenn, which is what matters here (not New Shepard), the jury is still out. By contrast, for Falcon 9, the jury returned a verdict long ago.
> The business case to sell a $1000 terminal for under $300 isn't closing. They're subsidized right now, and public perception will be very different once the real sticker shock comes in.
They say they've been cutting the manufacturing cost from $3000 to $1500 to $1000; you are assuming they aren't going to succeed in cutting it further. Even if they can't get it all the way down to $500 (the current sticker price), if they can get it down to $600 or $700, a $100-$200 price rise for new customers caused by withdrawing the subsidy is unlikely to be a huge issue. (The $300 figure was just an aspirational goal Musk set, nobody is paying that little right now, who knows if anyone ever will.)
Some stuff I read sounded rather bleak for the likes of FAANG.
So; how did antitrust work out for Bell? Not too terribly bad, in the long run. (Though there were huge benefits for us consumers. . . )
Honestly I'm not sure of the main corporate opposition to anti-trust other than ego and/or laziness. It'll force the resulting business to get even better. If you got your position by being the best, you can still be the best in the new world.
'messed it up'- care to elaborate?
Even slightly rural places it’s not cost effective for traditional isps to dig a cable so what’s the markets solution? Launch thousands of satellites! I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. The market has failed, requiring external forces to intervene(the government). Whether it be Title 2ing them or allowing municipal competition something needs to happen