Tech only has one strategy: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
mrsteinberg.com
mrsteinberg.com
EEE is specifically an attack on open systems: make something compatible with an open system, do a good job at it, people switch to you, extend your thing, people start using your extensions. You've moved people from an open system to your proprietary one.
All of their examples [1] are in the form "offer a thing people want which is free up to a point, and then when they get to that point they won't be able to stop using it because they're hooked". This is a fine thing to talk about, but using the "EEE" terminology for it both weakens the terminology and makes it unclear what you're saying.
[1] Except the Amazon delivery one, which doesn't fit the rest of the post since there's no step where they increase the charge.
That this tactic happened to work for open source & standards seems like less than 50% of it's relevance to me. The general idea seems self-substantial.
Of all the pieces, I think "embrace" probably requires the most fudging, the most overcoming of internal "is it really though?" in permitting ourselves to see similarity.
Even "enshittification" ("of tiktok")[1] feels notably within this general pattern, of getting good to get bad. Microsoft's specific embrace was to go after standards & open source projects, but whether we select only a focus to make us naive to the strategy & how it still apploes is up to how much we want to bind our minds.
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
I'm not advocating for EEE, but it is interesting. An broad analysis of EEE in tech, especially open source or "open core" projects would be very interesting to see.
Also, I stopped using Amazon entirely a couple of years ago now, mostly moving toward ordering directly from manufacturers. Do you know what I didn't have to give up? Fast, inexpensive shipping.
What pros does off-amazon bring for you?
For the sorts of things you're talking about, I just buy from local businesses (aside from PLA, which I buy directly from my favorite manufacturer).
My experience has been that I've lost nothing by avoiding Amazon. It's no more of a hassle for me. If I have a problem with an order, I get better service from the company directly than from Amazon. Etc.
It's all upside for me, and no downside.
Competitors can't even raise their prices nor can they compete with free. Even Appget (Windows Package Manager) shut down due to the same reasons.
If we’re just talking about offering more to attract customers in a growth phase then locking them in with some kind of market dominance then I agree that is the VC playbook, but let’s not water down the meaning of EEE to refer to that. Walmart has been doing it for decades.
Well, did you have an email server for your family, friends, and your small business? And someday your friend or customer using it reported that there's no incoming mail from Google nor their email to Gmail addresses aren't delivered. You check the reason and see that for Google - "because they fight spam" - your IP address seems to have a reputation not good enough for accepting email from your server. No discussion, no reason revealed, no way to appeal, no human on the other side, and nothing can be done. Of course, you can outsource mail delivery to one of the big email operators - big enough that Google doesn't try to block them even if they allow for spamming.
This way the very idea of email as a common, freely available service is strangled step by step for years.
If this article confuses people about what the term means, then it might be that much harder to for people to learn how to recognize the problem and distinguish it from other situations.
> policymakers should focus on freedom of exit
It has nothing to do with their cost or ability to deliver quickly: I get faster-than-Amazon delivery from Gamestop, Adorama, Office Depot, Best Buy, Target, and even people who sell electronics from Japan. It's a bit obscure that this is going on because "important" people like your congressperson, writers for the New York Times and other people in the media industry are getting quick shipping. It's never going to be a gag in a television comedy that Amazon shipping is slow now, the way it is in my town. (The fact that this article is "looking in the rear view mirror" on this is a sign that their strategy to gaslight people is working.)
What it does have to do is that your shopping sucks if you live in a small town and if you don't have a Cheesecake Factory in your town, AMZN thinks "We're number one, why try harder?"
Thing is they are not number one. They hope I am going to to keep subscribing to Prime out of inertia but I think they have very little empathy for people because if they did they'd understand how irksome it is to be paying a subscription for a "premium" service which is worse than average -- every other retailer sees quick delivery as a way to impress me and win my business in 2023.
But I am not. And you know, if I really want to watch Rings of Power so bad I will just download it from BitTorrent.
My take on Amazon is that is not anything unique or special, I mean Azure is evenly matched with AWS. Compared to, say, Best Buy, Amazon has a wider product line, but a lot of that is the Scamazon Marketplace which I think is a lot less honest than Ebay. Some people are still under Amazon Prime's spell but under their current trajectory it is a matter of time before AMZN reports their first quarter where they net lose Prime subscribers.
I definitely understand this stance, but it undermines your whole argument by bringing up the fact that prime is not just about shipping. Shipping is one of the benefits, but there are many others. If you don't feel it's worth it, then definitely cancel, but saying you'll steal some of it feels dishonest. I think maybe a better way to get the same point across is that you could watch it at a friend's house, or wait for the dvd.
I just canceled prime, but for the opposite reason. I'm so close to multiple warehouses that it's not really any faster than if I just order it regularly. I also pirate their content from time to time, but not because I don't want to pay for it, because the interface in the app sucks.
On a complete tangent, I wish someone had a service where I could buy physical media, and have it streamed for free until the day after it is delivered.
But I do think that 90% of the "benefits" of Prime are things that people would only think are valuable in the context of a press release. None of it is going to make up for the loss of 2-day shipping, which is unique I think because it adds value to AMZN's core service.
There was a time when AMZN operated at a loss to grow market share, that was a time when it was really preferable to other retailers. There was a time when AMZN was the first retailer I would look to to buy something online. Over the last three years it gradually became the last. Today it is more like: I go to Best Buy in person, see the part I want is not in stock, I order it from AMZN, get it from AMZN, go back to Best Buy, see it is in stock at Best Buy, I buy it at Best Buy (which doesn't redline my community with substandard service) and I return to AMZN.
I have never been that way before and would never do it to another retailer but after suffering the insult of losing two-day shipping right after AMZN boasted that people in some anointed ZIP codes would be getting faster shipping, AMZN is at the bottom of my list. It is a policy that is penny wise and pound foolish because I am sure thousands of people have read my complaints on the topic and I am sure I've helped at least one other person quit. Some industries are senescent and ripe for disruption, but there is a long line of retailers that want the dollars that AMZN is chasing.
In the late '90s/early 2000s, there were a few services that did exactly this. I remember buying CDs that included details on how to also stream/download the music. (I believe I also bought at least one DVD that worked similarly.)
Physical + streaming was tried in the market by several competitors, and the market ultimately didn't want it.
Amazon would not mind if they lost a portion of Prime customers vs extending logistics to less profitable areas. When I first signed up for Prime, EVERYTHING was 2 days. No matter what warehouse it came from. I got 2 day air shipments of heavy things from 2000 miles away. And for 3.99 it would come overnight.
Wondering about these questions last summer I looked at package tracking data for shipments I was receiving and did some simple simulations. I get a lot of packages from warehouses that are half a day's drive away, of course these are not driven directly to me, but it is very reasonable to aggregate traffic in nodes such that it gets to me in two days, you get only a small benefit from adding more nodes and stretching it out to three days. The more vendors that are "bought in" to using a logistic network, the faster the network can run economically because it can run more frequent trucks along the edges of the network. If Amazon thinks it is getting ahead by cutting out providers like UPS because they are unionized and end up building their own inferior network at great expense they may be just cutting off their nose to spite their face.
The book The Goal points out that most people's commonsense gets it completely wrong when it comes to operations and logistics and one thing I'd point out is that, to first order, costs go up when you increase the time things spend in transit because it demands capital being tied up in inventory, paying for warehouse space, etc. It may be cheaper to send something a long distance via truck than by air but if it just coming from New Jersey or Pennsylvania adding days adds cost and opportunities for more quality problems such as packages getting lost, damaged, stolen, burnt up in a fire etc.
Amazon's big problem is it has no moat. Granted there is a two-sided market in the Scamazon Marketplace but in the long term that is an exercise in brand destruction because each time you buy from it you are rolling the dice to get ripped off. Amazon Prime is a bunch of random services that don't hang together, it's the kind of bad idea that Sears would have gotten back in the 1980s. For instance the streaming video doesn't really add to the rest of the offering and there are so many other streaming services that there is nothing special about it. Amazon is going its own way to make a logistics network that might impress your congressman (he'll get half-day delivery from Virginia) but every other retailer is going to team up with UPS and FedEX to have access to a best-of-breed network for their constituents. If Republicans ever wake up to red states being redlined, Amazon's investments in politics will become a huge liability.
Extinguish is the best tools available and maintained by those who can afford it for 'free' with great features exclusive and locked in on top of it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28324999
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29686076
Standards by definition can't innovate at the pace technology is evolving.
Successful companies have no choice but to continuously iterate.
Natural Monopolies occur even if it isn't your strategy because of the nature of things.
Wikipedia, Craigslist didn't set out to become a monopoly, but it naturally became one.
If you don't understand the underlying natural forces that are at force, then you succumb to conspiracy theories like OP.
Do company take advantage of the natural forces?. Of Course. Blitzscaling is a business strategy that takes advantage of this. But it is more of, someone will have a monopoly due to natural forces, might as we be us and might as well accelerate that process
By that analysis, Google is a strong company not because of technological virtuosity or because their products are that good, but because they can strongly monetize any product that they make and it is hard for any other ad brokerage to get in because they don't have the inventory.
Regulators were slow to catch on to this issue in the critical years, they just didn't see anything wrong with match.com buying all the other dating sites. They are just now waking up to the danger of Microsoft buying Activision which is bad not just because it hurts gamers in the short term but in the long term our noncompetitive domestic markets will lose out to markets like China that are more competitive and make better products. (e.g. we are talking of banning Tik-Tok precisely because Google, Facebook and such will kill any attempt to make an innovative social platform in the US)
Precisely? Why are you so sure?
You are aware of China's ownership, control, ability, and motive to use Tiktok for state purposes, whether surveillance, influence, disinformation, or otherwise. This is the biggest stated risk I've seen across various media (at least what I read; I'm not on Facebook). You disagree?
Perhaps you have evidence that the claims above are false? Do you think these claims are manufactured by US social media companies to defend their turf? This would seem the less plausible claim in my view.
Three articles, one quite different than the rest:
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2022/10/tiktoks-secre...
https://apnews.com/article/technology-china-united-states-na...
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/economy/2023/1/26/a-us-state-a...
In the case of games, Genshin Impact for all of it's flaws is a new franchise that is winning players. The other day I was looking at a "top 25 games" list for the XBOX ONE and was kinda shocked that I didn't see any games that I didn't know already (the top 25 list for a Nintendo platform would have some games that would be new to me and get me excited about games) One of the top games was Skyrim which is a good game but was a bargain bin game for the Xbox 360. The rest are all forgettable (in my mind) entries in series like Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, Madden NFL, etc.
From the outside the western video game industry seems to be putting up healthy revenue numbers but I think it is senescent and has been rotting for some time. A situation like that is very dangerous for our markets being taken over by actually competitive competitors controlled by the CCP.
What do you mean by a healthy market in this case? You mean social media, right? Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, NarcissisticScrollParade, etc? What is lacking? I don't mean from a historical particulars point of view (e.g. TikTok found a recipe that seems to work for now); I mean from a structural point of view. What properties of the _market_ are not functioning well?
And, to accept your premise for the sake of argument, who can revive the US social media market?
China pumps tremendous resources (money, connections, etc) into TikTok.
Are you suggesting that a "healthy market" is a good solution to a state sponsored competitor? By "healthy market" what do you mean? If you mean the "free market" as defined by many economists, then we need to recognize the well-known patterns of market failures. What market failures do you see?
Perhaps you recognize how nation-states can and do interfere with free markets quite effectively, at least from a nationalistic perspective? The US does it for agriculture. Since at least the Cold War, the US has poured resources (funding, careers) into mathematics and engineering for the benefit of American industry.
Let me know where you are coming from? I'm not trying to rehash underlying economic philosophies; we don't have to subscribe to the same economic theories. I'm interested in what you specifically think is happening and why.
The most common is to relegate your competitors stack into an open one and thus eliminate their profit margin.
(I was thinking that if the competitor's stack covers your whole business you open source an implementation, you don't have a business. And so whatever business you have left after open sourcing (support, etc) is your new business, and the rest is complement. But this is getting pretty far from what the term normally means which is finding areas that are naturally complementary to your existing business and commoditizing them.)
Still makes me sad sometimes.