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Mobile startups that don't have a substantial value add outside just what they do on the phone are just prototyping new features for the FAANG companies.

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Your not wrong, but it's also a bit depressing that we live in a world where giant companies can just wait until they see something becoming successful enough and then use their essentially unlimited resources to copy it and put the original creator out of business.

Tech was exciting for a time, but human history is full of gatekeepers demanding their rents and only allowing others in their turf if they aren't too threatening.

We've been living through the good parts. It is only going to get more "normal".

Think different.

Thanks for this comment. It saddens me whenever I hear normality is the gold standard, because what is normal?

That seems to make the assumption that creative ideas and experimentation are more important or more valuable for product innovation than having the resources and scale to actually mass-produce or "productize" new innovations. I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption, but I think it's easy to tip too far toward valuing "being the first to do something" and not recognizing the value of the other part.

The Sherman-Antitrust Act recognizes that value and how power can be abused in absence of that value.

This argument seems more relevant to intellectual property laws. The complaint was about Apple stealing ideas from their app developer community.

Isn't the idea these days that you make a successful startup in the hopes that it gets acquired by a giant company, as it would be more economical to buy their competition out, with their customers and IP, than replicate it themselves?

When the platform owner can kill your product with a flick of a switch, your negotiating position is weak

If FAANG does it better then why does it matter? If their business was successful enough to get copied by FAANG then they probably already made enough money to move onto something else.

Patents provide one way of stopping this kind of predation, but everybody hates patents so we have to pretend otherwise.

It’s really great. If the startup flops FAANG is out 0. If it’s a must have they just add it to the next release.

Thinking this has happened for a while. What happened to all the disk defraggers when windows added one built in? I think maybe they licensed it... it it sure didn’t help the market.

A smart Windows partner would step in to co-design and contribute technology around a core feature in windows, to make sure they had what they needed from the platform while still having a lot of value-added sale.

The disk defragmenter included with Windows was somewhat lousy, but it gave OS hooks needed for other tools to do live defragmentations. The problem is that in both the consumer and enterprise spaces, underlying disk storage maintenance was just a checkbox - you had to sell any specialized version as part of a performance and antivirus suite.

Citrix also did something similar with Windows Terminal Services. Before terminal services, Citrix had to maintain a Windows NT source license just to be able to manage all of the required OS hooks.

Microsoft used Spyglass Mosaic as the foundation for Internet Explorer 1, and Direct3D was from an acquired company called RenderMorphics.

Apple of course does something similar - see their acquisitions of Siri, Shazam, Testflight and Workflow. They are stories around Steve Jobs trying to acquire DropBox pretty early in its history as well.

It helped consumers though. It would be terrible if every binary in my system was a separately licensed purchase.

Does open source have this issue? Serious question I’m trying to think of examples but coming up short.

That of course was one of the things that got Microsoft in monopoly trouble way back when. I suppose the current players are lucky they have a duopoly.

I guess you’re being downvoted because it’s an unpopular opinion and/or there’s some historical precedents that “it’s just a feature” (eg Dropbox) doesn’t always hold true.

That said, I can’t see a world where if Dropbox was a startup today, that they wouldn’t either get acquired, or cloned as a good enough native feature, putting them out of business, which is ultimately your point.

> I can’t see a world where if Dropbox was a startup today, that they wouldn’t either get acquired, or cloned as a good enough native feature

Like iCloud Drive?

This sounds right but still feels wrong. You could argue that even Uber (can one imagine a bigger mobile "startup"?) is "just prototyping new features for the FAANG companies".

Any manufacturer who sells exclusively (or even primarily?) on Amazon.com (think Ring) is potentially an acquisition target from Amazon.com

Personally, I don't have any solution but it gets in the way of my dream: I'd prefer the mobile platforms (iOS, Android) require that independent software vendors submit human and machine readable source code and build instructions and have the app store build and serve binaries with its own keys (think F-droid). Probably opt-in to begin with but eventually, I'd like this to be a requirement to be on the app stores.

I think what's missing is a true regulatory grappling with the nature of "platforms." Businesses have long had and used the ability to pull the rug out from under their clients/customers. But the current situation is a different beast. We now have a whole category of businesses that can only reach their customers through one of several competing platforms. But when you use these platforms, as you must, you exist and function entirely at the whim and pleasure of the platform. The platform can, at any time and for any reason, essentially swallow you and grow commensurately more powerful. The only brakes that exist right now are essentially the fear of regulation, good will/reputation management, and desire for focus on the part of the platforms. Those are some flimsy brakes.

These are uncharted waters, if you ask me.

Uber is a transportation logistics company's and a regulatory arbitrage company, not a "mobile app" company or a "gadget" company.

It’s actually a marketplace for independent drivers to offer their services.

Isn't this why parents exist?

It's also why Linux exists.

As tech companies continue the hard turn from value proposition to value extraction, it's getting easier to say "no thanks" and switch to open systems shared among the public.

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