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Comment by samsonradu | Hacker News Reader

Sibling comments make a point on how a physical store is easier to bring to market.

> It’s extremely difficult to project forward 10 years in tech.

I think this is a common misconception. Tech giants rise mostly because they create new markets. Since their beginnings nobody beat Microsoft on operating systems, nobody beat Google in search, nobody beat Facebook on social network market share.

The point would be that once you're dominant in a market it's very hard to be moved away and it takes more than a decade. I find it hard to believe a 1T dollar company can be outcompeted during less than a few decades.

Also as the tech/online market matures things naturally tend to slow down.

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> I think this is a common misconception. Tech giants rise mostly because they create new markets. Since their beginnings nobody beat Microsoft on operating systems, nobody beat Google in search, nobody beat Facebook on social network market share.

Isn't this just another way of saying survivor bias? They are big because they survived and out-competed the competition, no? There were and are other operating systems, other search engines, other social networks. And sometimes even having the same things said about them... Think MySpace before Facebook. Until they got conquered.

These giants are huge because the internet -- to some approximation -- has no geographic boundaries. It's much easier to consolidate and hold power when you don't have to literally expand to every corner of the world where people physically live to capture them. Amazon and Facebook can acquire entire towns with nothing but a few more servers in the rack.

I agree that the internet is a more liquid and prone to winner-takes-all market. That’s why regulators tend to apply different rules.

I’m not sure if MySpace could be considered a giant at the time. Sure, it had popularity and market share, but it was not spraying billions around buying up competition or consolidating its business (Instagram, Whatsapp).

So Facebook didn’t take down any giants, instead it won a fair market competition. That was my point.

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