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Comment by program_whiz | Hacker News Reader

agreed, but if a company is making millions for the security of software, the incentive is to keep it secure so customers stick with it. Remember the lastpass debacle, big leak and lost many customers...

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Directly security-focused products like lastpass are the only things that have any market pressure whatsoever on this, and that's because they're niche products for which the security is the only value-add, marketed to explicitly security-conscious people and not insulated by a whole constellation of lock-in services. The relevant security threats for the overwhelming majority of people and organizations are breaches caused by the practices of organizations that face no such market pressure, including constant breaches of nonconsensually-harvested data, which aren't even subject to market pressures from their victims in the first place

I wouldn’t point to LastPass as an exemplar…

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/1/24146205/lastpass-independ...

I didn't, and my point was exactly that it's not a great one, so I think we largely agree here

Even for security-related products the incentives are murky. If they're not actually selling you security but a box on the compliance bingo then it's more likely that they actually increase your attack surface because they want to get their fingers into everything so they can show nice charts about all the things they're monitoring.

Aye. My internal mythological idiolect's trickster deity mostly serves to personify the game-theoretic arms race of deception and is in a near-constant state of cackling derisively at the efficient market hypothesis

Only if they have competition. Which long term is not the default state in the market.

> Which long term is not the default state in the market

Why not?

Why did Facebook buy Instagram and Whatsapp? Why did Google buy Waze? Why did Volkswagen buy Audi and Skoda and Seat and Bentley and so on?

Might as well ask why companies like money.

Sure, but the car industry is pretty old and there's plenty of competition still.

I’m not sure about plenty when you actually look at it, but in any case it’s because of government intervention.

Think about it for a second mate: competition leads to winners and winners don't like competition, they like monopolies.

And no, the car industry has almost no competition. It's an oligopoly with very few players and a notoriously hard industry to get in.

Oh yeah, corporations are so accountable. We have tons of examples of this.

I think for some reason some people still buy cisco products, so this reasoning doesn't seem to be applicable to the real world.

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