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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

I think customers feel, rightly or wrongly, there's no alternative to CrowdStrike.

There are so many alternatives to what GoDaddy provides, it is quite commoditized.

But also... true, their customers don't seem to care anyway? Or it's "cost of switch", even just mentally? If you were starting fresh it really wouldn't be any harder at all to go with any of numerous alternatives, but if you already have godaddy...

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I've actually not worked anywhere that has used CrowdStrike. It's usually ruled out as too expensive (I've mostly worked in public sector). I've had very good experiences with Sentinel One and Microsoft Defender. I've had terrible experiences with Trellix and Sophos."Oopsy" aside, is CrowdStrike really that much better than the competition?

The big four (CRWD, S1, Prisma, and MDE) all mostly comparable tbh.

EDR (especially Windows EDR) is heavily commodified.

A commodified market with no good product? Something is wrong here.

It's enterprise software. The people using the software and the people choosing the software are not the same people. In many cases they only buy it to satisfy a contractual or regulatory requirement and then the primary criterion is which one costs less or which one's sales reps give the best kickbacks, with considerations like "is it any good" not really playing a major role.

Race to the bottom.

I only worked at one shop that used CrowdStrike but TBH compared to the others I've had to deal with, definitely is the 'least' shitty compared to other competitors...

I always feel dumb and like I'm missing some fundamental principle thinking about companies like GoDaddy. They provide a pretty undifferentiated commodity with a relatively low bar to switching, don't seem particularly well run or trustworthy based among other things on events like this, and their brand and marketing give off a vaguely skeezy low-rent vibe. Is it just a perpetual motion machine of market sharing affording good marketing which then drives continued market share?

Are banks not fairly commodified too?

Did you move to a new bank after yours had a security breach?

There are so many breaches these days, companies don’t even have liability — any damages can be blamed on another breach.

Not commodified as much as regulated. The personal data that banks collect is probably mandated by the government, so switching banks doesn't really change the risk someone faces. And probably a bunch of other things that would otherwise be competitive advantages for customers too. The lack of full reserve banks (or close enough too) despite what would be a reasonable level of customer demand, for example.

> Is it just a perpetual motion machine of market sharing affording good marketing which then drives continued market share?

Worse. It's a market where most of the customers are unsophisticated but price sensitive, so they tend to prefer the provider with the lowest apparent price, and then the big providers compete on the basis of who can present the lowest apparent price through the use of dark patters, misleading claims, bait and switch tactics and hidden fees.

Example: GoDaddy provides a "free" site builder but if you use it the resulting site can't easily be extricated from their service and now you're locked in if you don't want to recreate your site. Meanwhile the price you were quoted for various services was an onboarding price and now that you've sunk a lot of time creating and improving the site you can't move, the price is going up.

This is, incidentally, a major reason WordPress is so popular despite being fairly miserable. It makes it easy for unsophisticated users to get started and your site isn't tied to a particular host.

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