You’re right that phone giants have too much power, but car companies are already selling our data and injecting ads or preferred partners into the infotainment. It’s CarPlay that currently lets you avoid the abysmal and often subscription-based experiences they’re pushing.
I would love to see more open systems that would allow third-parties or users to provide software for vehicles.
If you're pro-consumer, you want an end to this. If you're pro-business, pro-entrepreneur, pro-innovation capital seeing upside of labor and invention, then you also want an end to this.
These two companies would be worth more as separate entities than the sum of their parts. Their value is being squandered as gigantic conglomerate platform plays. They piss away so many resources and grow fat on the areas they've lodged themselves into and peerlessly destroyed any competition.
I've consistently echoed this sentiment for years. Now lots of people are saying the same thing.
Break them up, and competition will become relentlessly breakneck to fill out the new, healthier ecosystem. It would be a forest fire yielding to new growth.
Google and Apple are the monopolies, here. Mega monopolies the world has never seen the likes of before. It's unreal how big and how much power they have. Apple and Google are practically God and more powerful than Christianity.
> car companies are already selling our data
It's wild that this is being thrown out as being even within the same order of magnitude as bad. Google and Apple are doing this 1000x worse. And for those that think Apple is a "privacy play", just look what they do to bend over to authoritarian regimes. They're still leveraging your data for advertising, and that play is bringing Apple more and more money year over year.
The phone giants have way too much power. They control people trying to write software, people trying to run software. They control every payment, all the payment rails. They control the communication. The defaults. The search. 98% of your life flows through them.
Your car is a pittance to that.
We need to break up the phone companies or limit what they can do with the devices after they've sold them to you.
Imagine if your car could tell you where you could drive. Or if businesses had to pay a tax to be visible from looking out your windshield. Or if they collected a percentage of everything you bought while you were out driving and shopping. Because that's phones. Google and Apple are our -- and everybody else's -- pimps and masters. You're nothing, I'm nothing. They're gods.
It’s not that I think Google or Apple are altruistic, or that we wouldn’t be better off if they were broken up, but as far as I can tell, the only space where it’s hard to avoid both of them is the mobile phone OS. And I think that’s mainly a function of the fact that generally people are happy with those two options. In every other category there’s other solid options and Google and Apple are easily avoided.
There’s a million things that I’m more worried about than the mobile OS duopoly. It’s going to be OK.
There isn't enough market surface area left to compete for. Anyone trying will spend tens of billions of dollars and still lose.
This has cemented Apple and Google as the eternal victors of mobile. There is no hope in competing. If Facebook and Microsoft gave up, all hope is lost.
Unfortunately, since there hasn't been any regulation against this anti-competitive duopolization, Apple and Google are complete assholes to everyone on "their" platform. It's one of the least free, most extractive markets in the world. And it touches everything and everyone. You cannot avoid it.
The only hope is regulation. Governments telling Apple and Google "no more app store, no more payment rails, no more defaults". That'll bring balance back to the universe.
Lots of market categories are duopolies. Even monopolies sometimes. Somehow the world keeps turning. Apple and Google won’t be the largest and most powerful companies forever, just like the companies that came before them.
It’s going to be OK.