Facebook is the new AOL
theverge.com
theverge.com
Jokes aside, they had some pretty fierce technology on the backend that, had it seen the light of day of Open Source, would have been the precursor to Docker and Protocol Buffers. All this back in the 90's.
I still can't believe that back in 2001 we have been building something like a german Netflix.
Also my colleague who sat right next to me thought it would be a great a idea to have something like youtube for music in 2002 (Soundcloud) And he actually had a working service but he gave it up :)
Twitter in various forms was done about 5 times (that I saw) before the Twitter came up. Quite a few social networks predated Facebook.
Two years later, Everything launched, a year after that, H2G2, and two years after that, Wikipedia.
In the end Amazon will win. Most of the others make their money by advertising or by selling technology to companies, which make their money with ecommerce or advertising. Amazon owns every part of this stack, which actually makes money. The bigger the Amazon brand grows, the less money will be left for the others. At the moment, this is not visible, because the whole market grows. Amazon knows this and just reinvests and waits.
AWS (the closest thing to software Amazon owns) will converge to 0 profitably as competitors copy the easily replicable service.
This is not to say there are some advantages in a few others (say, Rackspace appears to be simple to grasp, excellent human support) and GCE (load balancers don't need to be pre-warmed, etc).
But if anything, I see it increasingly harder for the other providers to keep parity with Amazon, because of their velocity and market share.
Now, for many people using cloud as just a easy way to get IP addresses, it's all the same, but once you start using a lot more of their services, they provide a lot of good stuff in what is basically "middleware" for applications to latch onto.
The question is whether an organization is doing this themselves (i.e. run their own Foo on their nodes) or is using the value added services or not.
What keeps on making money is the Amazon marketplace and their physical distribution infrastructure.
And if they make more money, the advertising parts of the competitors will make less.
And as people move away from 'raw cloud metal' to whatever the layer du jour is, what's underneath will matter less and less.
Of course, they were upset that she wouldn't respond to the funny sort of queries you could make of Siri. And my son really wishes her ability to do conversions extended to questions like "how many miles are in a light second" (Siri uses Wolfram Alpha to great effect here. Alexa - Amazon Echo - just apologizes and says she's added a bing search to the echo app.)
Amazon is a really bad example of a business that "actually makes money":
* http://www.ibtimes.com/amazon-nearly-20-years-business-it-st...
* http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/031414/amazon-nev...
* http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-n...
* http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2013/08/15/why-amazon...
AOL didn't use to let you leave AOL. For many years it was a 100% isolated walled garden. That is what made AOL AOL many years before AOL became an ISP.
They only grudgingly started adding ways of accessing internet content as the growth of the net so outpaced AOL that they had no alternative in order to keep subscribers.
I remember for a while on Usenet arguments were won by simply pointing out the other person had an @aol.com address.
And, if memory serves, when they first began providing access to the Internet they also charged extra for it (although I may very well be mixing them up with someone else).
Also, in some countries such as Germany, WhatsApp serves as a virtual mobile provider.
https://gigaom.com/2014/04/08/whatsapp-becomes-a-virtual-car...
It's like 1000 free minutes, nothing else.
Becoming a virtual provider works with E-Plus, that's why there are very innovative ones in Germany. I use simquadrat.
It also turns the dynamic of the web, where you actively seek out information through search and by following links, on the head, by pushing information to you, forcing you to at least acknowledge them. It has a similar ad-ridden, homogenous aestetic as AOL, practically unbearable without some ad blocker.
The Facebook app, on Android at least, uses a built-in browser when you click a link.
AOL is still a dial-up ISP, with 2 million customers still paying $20.48 a month. That's where their profit comes from. Their new junk-content business turned out not to generate much profit. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/07...)
It cannot be ruled out that those kinds of ads won't ever come to Facebook. Ads that buy with one-click (despite Amazon's patent) and rely on partial user confusion and deception as a business model.
If Facebook did that, or even if advertisers did that and Facebook didn't kick them off, it will put the brand in serious trouble, they'll get fined, etc.
This is the sort of thing small scummy businesses do where the owner can hide behind it, go bankrupt and start again. It's not something a top company would do.
I am not saying big companies won't do evil things. This isn't going to be one of them.
And also you don't need to confuse people into paying for nothing. You can do it with their eyes wide open. In-game purchases, for example.
And actually, I prefer MediaTek phones - you can root every single one of them and in contrast to other phone manufacturers, their preloader (first stage bootloader) even allows reading back the entire ROM. No restrictions. (For the interested, google for spFlashTool)
My one caveat with them have been the dreaded weak GPS, but I don't need GPS much, and with my last phone that works fine too anyway (but anyone considering MTK based phones: if you need GPS, read reviews; on some it works fine, on others it requires some light modding, and on some it's practically impossible to get the GPS working without sacrifices to elder gods and lots of swearing).
That said, it's becoming increasingly worrisome that so many OEMs just "default to Qualcomm" these days. If I were Samsung's CEO I'd put much stronger focus on making my own chips and putting them in my own devices (just like Apple), while also selling them to others, just like they sell their Super AMOLED displays and so on. I would also buy out AMD, mostly for their GPU expertise, but also to enter in the server/data-center market, which is more profitable than the mobile market. Samsung has the money and marketing clout to do much bigger things than AMD can do right now alone.
I don't know what the hell Nvidia is doing in mobile, but they always seem to screw something up. Their non-focus on energy efficiency in "mobile" and their focus on "performance" for umm..tablets, has proven to be a mistake with every single chip generation. Stop it, Nvidia! You need to win smartphones, not tablets, which are a dying breed already. And to do that you need low-end chips as well not just "PC-class mobile chips", otherwise you'll never get the market share you need to help you become "popular" in the mobile market.
And finally Intel - oh, Intel, how I despise thee. Two main reasons why I don't want Intel to win even 5 percent of the mobile market. Short version: 1) they are anti-competitive, 2) they don't deserve it.
Long version - Intel has started having quite the "monopolist culture" a while ago (at least a decade). They've learned that playing the monopolist card when in power "works" (to crush competitors and entrench themselves in the market), and they try to use it as often as they can and to the limit of the law (or even well beyond it, if no one is paying attention). Intel has almost wiped out GPU vendors from laptops through strongarming of OEMs and shady pricing tactics and, with Broadwell and Skylake having an even bigger focus on GPU performance, I predict within 2 years no one will even hear about an Nvidia GPU in an Intel-based laptop (unless we're talking $2000+ machines - maybe).
They also have a monopoly in CPUs for PCs and are now using the profits they get there to sell their their Atom chips below cost (a practice that's illegal in many countries, but either they aren't paying attention or Intel manages to twist that into some kind of "business deal" they are making with OEMs).
That's just the anticompetitive part. The "don't deserve it" part comes from the fact that Atom sucks compared to the highest-end ARM chips, even though it's built on 22nm FinFET, and those ARM chips are built on 28nm planar (if we're to compare them at the time of market launch) - essentially a 3 year/one node and a half process advantage for Intel. So they are trying to push bad products into the market and gain market share by selling them below cost to trick some OEMs into accepting their chips. And I say "trick" because that's what it is - at best, a short term advantage of them, because if Intel would ever have even 20 percent of the mobile chip market, those same OEMs would have to pay them more than what they pay for ARM chips, because it's "Intel".
So many other shady Intel practices such as tricking consumers into thinking "Celeron" chips are Celeron, when in fact they are Atom, lying about the real TDP/power values of their chips to make it seem like their PC chips are almost comparable to ARM (while being misleading about the fact that they also have much lower performance) and so on. Intel is a shady company through and through when it comes to selling its products.
You forgot one point: good (open-source) drivers. Intel drivers Just Work (tm), no matter if the OS is Windows, Linux or OSX. AMD/ATI drivers... not so much, and NVidia's work, but are still closed-source.
And the "The drivers Just Work" doesn't end for Intel in GPU drivers, but also the other driver classes - just take wireless and chipsets. One driver package for all, supplied by Intel, no need to hunt down obscure czech or russian sites for drivers (hello, Atheros).
Like the way they illegally sell their Atom chips cheaply and get away with it! They probably do it legally somehow but don't let that stop you hating them! Grr! Grr!
Come on, look how the competitive Atom chips are made with better technology! Why can't Intel use worse technology like Arm does and then we'd see how ... worse their chips are after forcing them to be worse!
Me: Yeah, go to xyzx.com
Them: Google.com ENTER -> XYXZ.com -> Click on first result
OTOH normally when I ask the people I see doing this why, their answer is more along the lines of "dunno" :)