> Both companies attempts to diversify their dependency on such info for their revenue have been broadly unsuccessful (Google fiber or a Google car anyone?)
IMO, you're wrong on this one. Things like Google fiber/car are not ways to diversify Google's revenue.
They are just more tools in their arsenal to keep collecting more data on users and improving their ads.
By offering things like Google fiber, they ensure more people get online and that's more data they can collect.
Same with FB. Terragraph and Aquila are/were just ways to get people online so more data can be collected and fed into "the machine"
> AWS knows that if they take too much of ES' market that they won't survive. If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported.
I don't get how you came to this conclusion.
If Elastic goes bust, why would Amazon suddenly drop support for product? They have customers paying millions for the service, why the heck would they drop it?
If anything I would expect Amazon to keep the service and work harder to ensure good service, so they can absorb that portion of the market not being served.
> by just installing and maintaining that product as a service?
You are seriously underestimating the value Amazon provides by "just installing and maintaining" those services. Maintaining a service at the scale they offer is a huge undertaking.
You get the high-availability, the hundreds of engineers working to keep those services up and make them talk to other AWS services easily. You get teams of engineers on-call to react to any failures.
I agree with you that this has a bad effect on the companies that originally created those projects, but I do see a huge value in what Amazon offers.
The entitlement those people have is ridiculous. They are literally not paying anything for the service and come in demanding things.
It's funny that all these people moving away from WhatsApp (for no good reason, IMO. Facebook can't read your private or group messages anyways thanks to e2e) and think the free app they downloaded will have the same level of features as the one funded by a multi-billion company.
TBH I disagree with your statement here. It's not just the USA that can do this. Europe and UK did this pretty successfully. Thanks to their legislation Facebook won't share data with WhatsApp.
But I agree what you say is true when it comes to emerging countries. But then again, maybe they do.
Take Brazil or India as examples. They have such massive population that if they wanted to, they could impose financial penalties to Facebook for doing that. The problem is figuring out if politicians in those countries have the incentive to do that though.
This is called commoditization. Pretty much every company does this.
You offer a product that would normally be paid, for free and gain market share. Then you build a business on top of that customer base you created.
That's where WhatsApp comes in for Facebook. They've gained huge market share, now they can attract businesses that want to sell directly to consumers. This is pretty handy and common in countries like Brazil.
Before people start shouting against Facebook, I'll reiterate that every company does this:
- Microsoft did by driving PCs' prices down so they could gain software market share.
- Stripe does it, with things like Stripe Atlas. They commoditize creating your own business by making it very simple. The idea is that [some of] those new businesses will eventually use Stripe and will help the company grow.
They love the stuff in Ireland. I have no idea why people use it. It doesn't do much better of a job than a rake would. It's completely stupid