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Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

I don't think vertical integration should be made illegal, and "Amazon Web Services offer exclusive Amazon-designed chips" doesn't to me seem like an abuse of monopoly power any more than "Apple iPhones use exclusive Apple-designed chips" does. What is the abuse of power that forcibly splitting apart the company would solve?

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Vertical integration can take us to dark places, but it can also provide incredible product experiences.

I think with Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, you have a good competitive landscape to work with right now. All of these players already making their own chips. ~4 solid verticals that are somewhat compatible and highly competitive with each other in large, mostly-overlapping regions.

Honestly, things feel pretty OK to me when you factor it all in. If it was just Microsoft or Apple doing the vertical chip thing and they were going absolutely hockey stick over it, then perhaps. But there are several competent players doing this now.

Thanks for the perspective. I guess where I’m coming from is Google was a web search company. They’ve expanded into mobile and that also means their own mobile OS. They also got into browsers. Similar could be said about Apple. To me it’s less about vertical integration and more about expansion. Walmart used to be grocery. Then they added retail. Neat experience at the time as a consumer, but it killed local retail and has gut punched other national retail. Since then they’ve added auto service and pharmacy. At what point does someone come in and say, ok giant corporation, you’ve proven you’re so large you can enter into most if not all markets and decimate your competitors but it’s not a long term net benefit because we’re consolidating everything under too few umbrellas. Maybe I’m wrong to think that and I do recognize the benefits of scale. I’m just not convinced a civilization is thinking long term enough when I keep seeing small businesses go under and medium businesses get acquired (aka: bought up). It seems like this is a meaningful part contributing to the disparity in wealth.

I'd be worried if they had some wonder-chip with no competition that they rented out at exploitative prices but that's not really the situation.

Yeah, there's plenty of competition in the chip market — Apple, Intel, AMD, Samsung, and Qualcomm all are in the CPU business, and Amazon entering it as well seems like increased competition and a win for customers. And AWS is facing heavy competition from Azure now that MS has the exclusive OpenAI deal, so I'm not too worried about consolidation there either.

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