Hacker News Reader

Comment by thegrimmest | Hacker News Reader

But if your laundromat is better in some way (service, cost, marketing), why wouldn't you want to grow? And if the market is a fixed size, (which just about every market is) doesn't that inevitably result in Paul adapting to keep up or closing down? When did it become immoral to realize this and strive for it? In this scenario everyone besides Paul benefits. And so it will be when you become the incumbent and face a competitor with a similar edge.

In Google's case, I suspect "search" will die to AI like Blackberries died to iPhones. Google is already proving that its size and bureaucratic unwieldiness are major obstacles to its competing in the AI space. Would we really hold back the vast social benefits of this progress because we object to some people becoming obscenely wealthy?

View on HN

I feel like this comment exists in a capitalist fairy tale where the only way a business could grow to overtake its competitors is by being better for consumers. Or where a business that has done so will always continue to do so once it has achieved market dominance.

> But if your laundromat is better in some way (service, cost, marketing), why wouldn't you want to grow?

Maybe you just want to run a laundromat? Is that not enough these days?

I mean, in the medium term, isn't this exactly how it goes? Aren't current incumbents relatively recent, and didn't they get there by being substantially better than their competition (Amazon, Google, Apple, Uber) or creating an entirely new business model (Facebook, Twitter). Isn't the dominant position that these companies enjoy only as fragile as the continued use of their product? If everyone switches to OpenAI for their search needs, Google will have a hard time surviving.

> Maybe you just want to run a laundromat? Is that not enough these days?

It's enough, until someone comes up with something that disrupts the industry. In a fast-evolving world, standing still is a doomed strategy. Do you really want to be the bookseller when Amazon comes along? Or the taxi driver competing with Uber? or on the board of RIM watching the Apple keynote in 2007?

Edit: Come to think of it, this rather parallels the natural world. Very few creatures have been able to stay relatively unchanged for tens of millions of years. They have been able to do so because the niche the evolved to optimally fill has remained unchanged and undisrupted. The rest of the natural world undergoes constant churn as new species emerge and others go extinct. It's the same in business. The less likely your niche is to be disrupted the more insulated you'll be from the necessity to change (assuming you've optimally adapted). Prime examples are best-in-class restaurants, whose proprietors often do just about the same thing their entire lives very successfully.

Just as an example, google has recently enshittified chrome to include gross invasions of privacy. How much has this moved the needle on chrome's browser share?

If it was as simple as people just ceasing continued use of the product, one would expect a large dip. If there are other effects in play besides "use that which is better, switch anytime" (e.g. anticompetitive behaviors), one would expect there not to be.

So, what reality do the numbers reveal?

p.s. the same exercise can be done regarding google's enshittification of search, and seeing how many people change the default search in chrome as a result

> How much has this moved the needle on chrome's browser share?

It depends on your timescale. Early adopters are already shifting away from it. I don't expect these effects to be immediate, but do you expect that everyone will still be using Chrome in 10 years? 20? 30? The same can be said of search. Early adopters are already using ChatGPT for many queries.

> I don't expect these effects to be immediate

I do, if this efficient market hypothesis were to hold true

The changes to the browser were immediate from one version to the next, what would stop everyone who doesn't like that from switching browsers instead of upgrading?

The fact that it isn't immediate kind of proves the point: the market doesn't always favor the best product, because dominant players can exploit their market position to make anti-features and hide them from users

If there was a truly efficient market, this behavior would be immediately punished. That it was not, proves that there is not.

If a dominant company can abuse its users for a decade or more before the market handles the problem, that speaks to a lack of a competitive environment, or anticompetitive behavior. The market has failed, and thus some intervention is warranted to stop the abuse sooner than that. I propose for your economic theory, though, the title of "eventual efficiency" in markets :)

Markets are exceptionally efficient over time, just like nature. Barring cataclysm, organisms that are displaced from their niches take ages to go extinct. It's the same with businesses. And what do you mean "immediate"? Days? Months? Years? Market effects take time, as anyone who has studied marketing will tell you.

> what would stop everyone who doesn't like that from switching browsers instead of upgrading?

The fact that they're human beings with their own lives and finite attention spans. There is an entire body of work segmenting markets into categories like innovators, early adopters, early majority, etc.

Did you wait in line for an iPhone on launch day? Why not?

> If there was a truly efficient market

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman whats a truly efficient market?

> that speaks to a lack of a competitive environment

The environment is plenty competitive. There is no further proof required of this than the continued rise of new companies that displace their competition. In a thriving ecosystem there is lots of death as well as lots of birth.

> The market has failed

It hasn't, it just doesn't move on timescales you can relate to easily. Organizing people to make and distribute things takes unimaginable time and energy. Supposing that a centrally planned intervention can be more efficient is the height of communist fallacy. It has failed every time it has been tried.

> The environment is plenty competitive

the environment is not competitive enough. There is no further proof required of this than that google can abuse its users and make products worse for years, perhaps decades, without experiencing market punishment for it

the end determines the sufficiency of the means: if the end is that google can do that, the current means are insufficient, because that is bad

> Organizing people to make and distribute things takes unimaginable time and energy.

it absolutely does, far, far moreso when you're going up against a giant like google

solution: slay the giant. We've tried not doing so, and it brought us here, to this failure point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com