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Comment by themafia | Hacker News Reader

Competition keeps entities honest. Monopolies will kill you. In Boeing's case both figuratively for the business and literally for it's customers.

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Looking at their general stock performance, I'd say it's actually only the customers being killed.

Agree with the sentiments of the sibling posts that monopolies seem as great for business as ever.

And the competition from Airbus may not make Boeing better either. On the contrary, Boeing may well get into a death spiral and a slow but painful death. What competition really means is that incumbents can die without impacting customers as other more competent alternatives will fill the void.

Boeing is going nowhere. One of the reasons Boeing’s bad behavior in last couple decades is also the reason they won’t die: The US Government

Yea. That's the other new phenomenon this new century has brought us, zombie corporations kept alive by feeding them good tax dollars after bad investments. We have to learn to bury our dead properly.

> Monopolies will kill you.

But sadly not fast enough. The monopolies get to make everyone else miserable for far too long.

>Monopolies will kill you.

So when is it gonna kill Google?

Or Microsoft. For all I know it primarily kills competition...

Not an OP, but I think the search monopoly is likely to end within the next 10 years. There were fundamental reasons that kept it alive and all of them are becoming irrelevant at various speeds.

Not that it must kill Google, they can still pivot and e.g. Google Cloud is already non-negligible in their revenue structure. But I'm relatively confident that search/ads duo won't be their main earner anymore just like Windows is not the main earner of Microsoft.

>Not an OP, but I think the [...] monopoly is likely to end within the next 10 years.

People have been saying the same about Microsoft for 20+ years. Now it's again, the most valuable company in the world.

At what point do people admit they're just bad at predicting the future?

Well Microsoft did lose their Windows monopoly, didn't they? I predict the same with Google and Google Search.

Well damn, you got me there, I should have been more specific, that's on me.

Google is already killing itself. The search experience has been getting steadily worse and worse on one end, but on the other, they're slowly strangling the incentives that were offered to publishers (ranking, traffic & monetization) to develop content for the "open web as dominated by Google".

Now, everyone who's running a website for a living is doing platform-native content for traffic and pairing it up with a newsletter-backed website or straight up investing in brand advertising campaigns to have access to their own audiences still, without relying on Google to deliver them.

My guess is that we're in for the second wave of Big Aggregators, but it's tough to say what the technological twist behind it will be, so it's not just a reddit 2.0.

Google has a monopoly in search. But it expanded to many other markets with plenty of competition. It will continue to thrive in those markets

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