kalu

Last week, a judge announced that a merger between Sysco and U.S. Foods would be illegal. The order points out that a combined Sysco – U.S. Foods entity would dominate the market for broadline food distributors and give Sysco the ability to charge ultra-competitive prices.

How does Sysco do it? It's not technology. The URL above describes system requirements for using Sysco's web application. Among other things, it states "eSYSCO does not currently support Macintosh OS" and "we highly recommend Internet Explorer version 6.0".

Technology does not change economic reality. From an economic perspective, Uber and Facebook have more in common with Sysco than they do with (name your favorite calendar app). These companies enjoy profitability today, not because they are technology companies, but because they have monopoly power.

See section 8. Hopefully this will make you think twice before blindly agreeing to TOS agreements.

What are the chances that Stripe paid Balanced to shut down? For Stripe, it seems like good business to "buy" your competitors when they are young. Plus, they would get a bundle of customers. And for Balanced, if the payment was high enough, a decision to wind down could make sense for the investors.

Competition is generally good for customers. In the short run it seems trivial... but in the long run it could matter in a big way.

Stripe: did you pay for Balanced's customers? If so, was it your idea to buy or did Balanced bring it up?

Patents get a bad wrap. This court decision from 2011 describes what may be a clear cut example of a patent protecting its inventor from malicious business practices.