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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

You underestimate the power of SaaS. Companies do SaaS precisely because it allows for this sort of capricious rent-seeking at wildly-unregulated levels of greed. That's just the name of the game. If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.

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This is Apple's new goal.

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/services-reven...

And they will need access to all of your data to provide those services.

Most of their services revenue is coming from Music and AppleTV+.

Which doesn’t require any of your data.

Most? App Store fees and Google deal revenue are each larger than Music and AppleTV+ revenue combined. Margins are likely better too.

Source?

Please explain why you think that’s apples new goal? The link doesn’t

There is nothing I am aware of that Apple has done indicating this and plenty to show they are not (e2e cloud backups, on device llm) they continually find ways to provide services without needing access to your data or keeping your data on device

What is 'wildly-unregulated levels of greed' supposed to mean?

> If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.

Google has never charged for search, nor has Facebook charged for their social network.

They arguably have bigger reach and market dominance than Adobe has.

There are good reasons Google and Facebook behave in different ways, of course. They aren't stupid, nor do they lack greed.

I am here just arguing that your comical assertion of mono-causality.

'If other companies don't do it yet', perhaps they have good reasons?

Google doesn't charge for search because it's users are their product, same with Facebook. Apples and oranges.

Google doesn't charge seekers for search. They definitely charge advertisers for search.

However, I understand your point, it's the truth of many businesses that if you're not paying, you're the product not the customer.

> However, I understand your point, it's the truth of many businesses that if you're not paying, you're the product not the customer.

No, that wasn't my point. My point was that the mono-causal point

> If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.

is wrong.

Adobe charges because it's users are their product, same with Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc.

That might be true, maybe. My point was that

> If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.

was wrong. Clearly, there's more than one reason that determines how companies behave.

Google sells eyeballs to advertisers, they don't sell to consumers. They've largely baked their pricing strategies in algorithms that self-adjust to increase costs as advertisers invest more, so that they don't have to expose themselves, but they still push prices up when they feel like it. They're also so brazenly exploitative that they were investigated and fined by the EU multiple times for doing bad things to their customers.

So yeah, they behave exactly the same - towards their actual customers, which are advertisers, not you.

Great example of this is to google simply name of most businesses. And then see first links in results being adds. While they same links are in result slightly down?

How did we end up in situation were anyone would be paying in this case? Seems like just pure exploitation of their position having combination of add network and popular search engine...

The new goal of a company is really to just capture some percentage of your total economic output on a recurring basis.

Infinite growth!

Sustained revenue growth

SAP has been doing this of late with wild pricing and customers are being pushed into a corner with forced upgrades.

No part of the definition of “rent seeking” is selling your product directly to the end user who pays you money.

Adobe doesn’t primarily sell products, Adobe primarily rents its products to consumers. Adobe is a literal actual real world example of a rent seeking company.

Simply renting out products is not necessarily the same as rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is the extraction of uncompensated value from others without increasing productivity. The classic example is putting up a chain across a river and charging passing boats a toll to lift the chain.

Ostensibly Adobe's customers are paying for continual improvement and support of its product and maintenance costs associated with whatever cloud features they offer. That's not rent-seeking.

True. The distinction is just not always as obvious, because rent seekers often don't start out as rent seekers.

They usually gain market share based on merit. Over time, structural factors such as network effects allow them to grow the rent-seeking part of their income while the merit based part declines.

Rent-seeking is a very entrenched idea though. Even the tiniest bit of merit in the distant past is enough to justify renting out inherited land for instance.

"Rent seeking" is an economic term where you sell access to something with a fixed supply. Classically land. The landlord does not need to do anything to gain money and it isn't possible to make any more land.

It doesn't really apply to any SaaS.

The landlord has to defend his claim and undermine competition

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