In a similar vein, my 'smart' thermostat solution for my oil furnace has been to splice in a relay board that's connected to an esp32 running esphome through home assistant. On that board, and many others around the house, I have many 'virtual thermometers running again off esp32's using dht11's and esphome.
This configuration has allowed me to control the single-zone furnace using any or a combination of 'virtual' thermometers to turn the relay board on/off depending on conditions. I left the real old honeywell thermostat on the wall as a fail-safe situation in case the system comes crashing down, to prevent the house from freezing up in the winter -- Just set at a low minimum.
The downside of this is I either have to directly adjust the temp via phone interface / tablet interface / or google-assistant interface, but when that is done, it is all done locally. Simply toggling a simple relay board that just connects the 2-wire thermostat feed like a typical thermostat does. It has worked great!
In addition, one of the heat pump units (MrCool!) in the house was able to use a cloud-free dongle to bring it's controls into local-only control as well via home assistant, as well. This can also be controlled via phone / tablet / google home interface (I subscribe, I feel home assistant is worth supporting).
All of the local only devices are able to be accessed from afar using tailscale into the local network, with subnet routing.
When you have something like home assistant controlling it all, it's quite easy to set up situations like 'when the outside temp is less than 15(f)', turn the heat-pump off, and use the oil furnace instead, etc.
It seems the commercial control boards that do things of this nature cost a heck of a lot more, and effectively do very similar things.
It's a good time to start really considering a more local-based solution if you have the time to get the initial configurations all sorted!
This is the problem with breaking Chrome out of Google. It’s not just OpenAI, but the constellation of potential buyers is short and problematic.
Is Apple a good buyer?
Oracle?
OpenAI?
NVIDIA?
The Saudis? (I think I’m kidding about that?)
Someone is going to buy this for $100B and find a way to make a (big) profit off of it. I’m not sure the new landlord is going to be less rapacious than the last one was.
Chrome (and control over Chromium) go to a newly formed, independent nonprofit. The nonprofit is not in any way under Google's control.
Google receives zero compensation. The nonprofit is funded by Google at say $250M/year for 20 years... by which I mean Google writes checks and gets absolutely nothing in exchange. The funding is conditional only on the nonprofit doing something that can be vaguely viewed as shipping a browser. Don't like that? Shoulda thought about it before you started getting all monopolistic.
The nonprofit is required to spend all its incoming funds, and forbidden to do anything but provide a browser. Just the browser. No services. All elements of the browser are AGPL. The nonprofit is forbidden to accept any offer that would put it under the control of any other entity. Every Chrome/Chromium user can become a member of the noprofit and then vote for the board. The board may not recommend its own candidates.
The browser isn't allowed to have a default search engine, LLM, "safe sites list", sync server, or whatever. In fact, it's not even allowed to provide a list to choose from. The user has to find them.
No, I don't know if that's feasible under applicable law, and honestly I doubt it is. But it'd be the right direction to go.
This is hilarious! So billions of dollars of capital invested by Google on R&D results in all of the IP being seized with a $250m/year annual obligation?
> It’d be the right direction to go
Putting the legality of this aside for a moment, the second order effects of the government seizing IP at this scale would cause a massive downscaling of R&D investment followed by IP rapidly fleeing the country.
...except Chrome was not and is not an illegal enterprise.
The charges were against search and ads.
If the government made a decision like this it would discourage companies from trying to invest in OSS the way that Google has. Considering that this model has worked out amazingly well for the average person, that would be bad.
> ...except Chrome was not and is not an illegal enterprise.
> The charges were against search and ads.
The textbook definition of “monopolistic behavior” is “using your monopoly in one sector to extend your power in another sector”.
It’s not illegal to have a monopoly. That can happen if you are completely innocent, just because no competitors choose to compete with you.
It’s illegal to abuse the power of your monopoly.
What was the biggest browser when Chrome launched? It was Firefox. Where are they now? On death’s door.
What was the biggest commercial browser when Chrome launched? It was Opera. Where are they now? Also on death’s door.
Do you ever remember seeing ads for Chrome in any of Googles other offerings?
A better question would be, “Before 2020 or so, do you think it was possible to use Google Search without having Chrome advertised to you?”
Chrome got special treatment above and beyond anything available to anyone else. Even more than anyone else with an unlimited Google ad budget. It got special placement in the Google search interface. “Try chrome!” On the otherwise bare Google search page. You know, the one that was famously minimalistic and “ad-free”.
Google leveraged its search and ads pseudo-monopolies to help Chrome become its own pseudo+monopoly.
And now that Chrome is its own pseudo-monopoly, what is their behavior?
Well, now, you can’t install (good) ad blockers anymore. Does that benefit users, or is that abusing their browser monopoly to help Google’s other business lines?
And until approximately yesterday, they were saying they were going to disable third party cookies. That’s nice. It probably would help some users. Note that it will definitely hurt Google’s competitors.
And it’s interesting timing, isn’t it? They could have done this, to help users, at any point in the past 15 years, but they only decided to do it recently, when their search and ad businesses are a little shaky compared to where they used to be.
Google absolutely used its search and ad monopolies to build a browser monopoly. And now that they have a browser monopoly, they’re using the power of that monopoly to act in ways contrary to their users interests.
> "What was the biggest browser when Chrome launched? It was Firefox"
No way. Internet Explorer had about 70% of the market, with Firefox at about 15%.
Today Chrome has basically the same marketshare as IE back then. Courts found that Microsoft created IE's dominant position by abusing its monopoly, and now it seems to be Google's turn.
Oops, sorry, you’re right. The biggest browser was IE. The same rhetorical argument holds… IE isn’t even on death’s door. It’s so dead that I forgot about it.
Chrome is wildly popular because it's a GOOD BROWSER. Google's search and ad monopoly do not matter; people loved the browser because it was fast, minimalist, bundled flash and PDF readers, and had great support for adblockers.
More than for any other Google product, Chrome won because it was good in its own right.
Now that Google has gotten rid of adblockers we will see exactly how much ability they have to compel people to use the browser :)
This third-party cookie thing has been in the news for half a decade at this point. It's not a new idea at all.
Yes, Chrome was great. Google search was also great.
That’s the nature of enshittification, and a core tactic of monopolists: give your customers something for free (or below cost) until you have killed the competition, and then exploit your “customers” (victims).
> Google's search and ad monopoly do not matter
Some questions:
When Google used its search monopoly to promote Chrome in a way that no other company is capable of (a link on the Google search main page), did that have some impact, or zero impact?
When Google used its ad monopoly to give Chrome free ad placement… That is, when the Chrome team was able to ‘buy’ keywords for free that Firefox, IE, and Opera had to pay 5 cents per click for… Did that have some impact, or zero impact?
> When Google used its search monopoly to promote Chrome in a way that no other company is capable of (a link on the Google search main page), did that have some impact, or zero impact?
No more impact than bundling a default web browser which can then be used to download another one. That's pretty uncontroversial these days, seeing as how iOS bundles a default browser BUT STILL forces you into using WebKit regardless of if you wanted to switch or not :)
> When Google used its ad monopoly to give Chrome free ad placement…
Except it's not free. There is an opportunity cost to flogging your own product in space that you otherwise could sell more ads in. You said it yourself: if other browsers were willing to pay 5c/click, how is it possible for that space to be free to Google?
It could be argued that having Google retain ownership of Chrome would give them too much of a business incentive to repeat the monopoly in the near future.
I think my preferred outcome would be donating it to either the Linux foundation or Apache software foundation rather than to a new foundation. But otherwise agree no default search/llm/etc...
This might fly in North Korea or Soviet Union, but seriously? At that point they could just abandon the project altogether. If we're discussing monopolistic position, we have to then account for what made Chrome come to such a position in the first place, aside from technical superiority of course. Leveraging google.com for promotion, integration with google services, android? What makes that different from what apple is doing? Yes, dominance was accelerated by strategic push from Google, but would it happen regardless? Was there even a war going on and won over FF, Safari, IE/Edge with unruly moves? It now needs to be broken away from a company because it's a success story? Was there a moment like "if you don't install/bundle Chrome we'll crush your business?" in style of Microsoft? Was there a moment like "Chrome or take a hike" in style of Apple?
I'm not even taking Google's side on this, just cannot see that side of it where they were evil to get to that point with it. If anything, Chrome made monopoly go away from clutches of Microsoft and to an extent Apple.
This relationship means that Google can be throwing whatever they wanted into Chrome, and not necessarily have it make its way into Chromium.
VS Code is the same way, and a lot of forks are finding out about that relationship right now when Microsoft blocked their C++ extensions from running on anything other than the proprietary build.
> If we're discussing monopolistic position, we have to then account for what made Chrome come to such a position in the first place, aside from technical superiority of course.
They were amazing marketers. They made television, bus stop, billboard, and other real life advertisements that you couldn't miss walking down the street. Firefox did... uhhhhh an online certificate[1] that only people who were devs or chronically online would know or care about.
Marketing and sales has long been the Achilles' heel of computer software. Mozilla and all these Firefox forks screwed up and continue to screw up to this day by only marketing their products (not just code anymore - think of it as an actual product or good) to internet niches and not at all in real life. The majority of the planet does log off sometime and touch grass, so that's where the sales pitch has to happen.
What company takes it over is an important question, and I honestly don't have a good answer for that. Nearly every company I can think of would have some problem.
But my question is, do we need Chrome to actually continue in its current state?
Chromium could continue as open source with multiple companies contributing to it (and maybe it falls under the linux foundation to oversee it) then with companies like Microsoft making their own forks.
We have Safari, Edge, Firefox (which its future is also in question, but that's a separate topic). I guess Oprah is still kicking around.
When not under Google's control, what value does Chrome really serve beyond its existing install base (which not discounting, but that can change)
I think the divide between HN and the world is significant, here.
For you (and me), switching browsers is annoying but doable. There was a time when I used Firefox, and then a time when I used Chrome, and someday I'll use something else. But for the vast majority of the world, the idea of switching browsers feels like a big challenge.
A lot of the world needs Chrome to keep working well for them.
It seems like all of the browsers now import data from other browsers when you install them. So, is that really much of the case?
Beyond the old stereotype "grandparent thinks the E is the internet", there is not much of a difference in how each browser behaves. The UI's are shockingly similar.
If it was, I would not think that Google would be as successful as they are to push Chrome heavily. Users would not transition over.
I will admit that I do sometimes have a different view of technology than many people, I mean as it is I have multiple browsers running right now. And generally when I step back I can see, oh yeah this really may be a bigger deal for most people.
I am struggling to see it in this case, especially with every browser trying very hard to make it as easy as possible.
> Beyond the old stereotype "grandparent thinks the E is the internet"
That stereotype is now "grandparent thinks Chrome is the internet". It still exists in a big way. It also exists in the sense that "no one ever got fired for downloading Google Chrome".
> For you (and me), switching browsers is annoying but doable. There was a time when I used Firefox, and then a time when I used Chrome, and someday I'll use something else. But for the vast majority of the world, the idea of switching browsers feels like a big challenge.
Given this paragraph suggests you haven't changed browsers in over 15 years, you should probably give it a try sometime and see if what you think is true still is true.
(If you don't want to do your homework, it is not true. A not-very-technical person could change browsers three times between now and dinner and have no issues)
> A not-very-technical person could change browsers three times between now and dinner and have no issues
Unlikely. Maybe if they have no saved bookmarks, no saved passwords, and no saved cookies (which isn't most users). Let alone usability differences. They might get lucky for certain OSes and certain browser current combos that auto-import, or they might not.
Whenever I watch someone change to a new browser, there are multiple serious issues to deal with.
Only if you wait a few decades to break a monopoly up. This is the fall out of the lack of US government intervention in their megatech companies.
We see the EU trying to fight back, but really all of this is far too late. There will be significant fall out, I’m sure. The sale of Chrome could be an unmitigated disaster.
Totally agree. I think the only option here would be separating the company into multiple companies. This seems to be the direction the Meta case is more likely to go in.
Eg. Google could become, Google Search (and AI), YouTube, and an independent ad tech company with the remnants of DoubleClick (maybe Google Ads moves into this group as well and has deals with the other two entities).
Chrome exists entirely as a power play. For a while, it aligned pretty well for consumers to get a browser that was produced by their search engine. However, it really only exists because google wanted direct control over their main medium.
Not quite. It exists (or at least, it originally existed) because Google didn't want Microsoft to have direct control over their main medium. (In particular, IE/Edge were funneling people to Bing.)
Correct. Chrome is not and never was a profitable venture apart from Google. It was a strategic move designed to push web technology forward to allow Google's other, more profitable businesses like Gmail, Google Drive etc. to compete with their desktop counterparts.
Before Chrome, Google had an Internet Explorer plugin called Google Gears that enabled functionality like LocalStorage and Service Workers since those were not standard web features at the time. Eventually they made Chrome and only then were they able to push to make those things into web standards.
Apart from Google, Chrome can't survive in its current form. It's not profitable on its own, and any attempt to make it so will inevitably result in either huge cuts to development staff or some pretty intense enshitification, or both.
While I shudder at the privacy implications of some of those buyers, there's a really ironic concept here: Google always had a conflict of interest between giving the user agency in their browser, and making ads unblockable (namely, its own). Under different stewardship, we might see a shift towards the user in the ad-blocking wars.
After all, the new buyer gets value out of your loyalty in using their browser to view more pages than ever before, so that it can use that data to train its LLMs! People bouncing from pages due to ads just gets in the way. We will have freedom from online advertising, for the low, low cost of a Larry Ellison or Elon Musk-managed panopticon!
If someone else buys Chrome, hopefully Google starts a Chrome "v2" from scratch and we'll have a few more years with a good early Chrome browser experience until that one is sold. And the cycle continues...
"We" could do that now. "We" haven't because it's not profitable to do so, and there's barely enough oxygen as it is for one non-profit browser funded by donations (Firefox).
Apple? No. They have a browser and buying Chrome gives them more monopoly power on MacOS. Plus, they have to maintain a version for other OSes and that … well, they might not hate it, but I doubt they'd like it.
Oracle? Fuck no. To my knowledge, nothing good has ever come from Oracle.
OpenAI? Privacy nightmare.
NVidia? uh, why? Not even remotely their gig.
The Saudis? Not their gig, but wind blows, river flows, who know? But, not exactly known for their software devlopment prowess.
Changing road design is not necessarily a cultural change from driving.
My country had very bad traffic deaths record. few decades later, traffic is much more intense and there're many more cars, but traffic deaths are waaaaaay down. Thanks to better infrastructure, better cars and better culture especially when it comes to drink and drive...
As the article notes, our threat model for who can identify where a picture was posted needs to change from “dedicated, skilled person” to “any creep with $20.”
That’s the point of the switch and it’s a big deal. We’re so used to posting pictures online…I’m just not sure it’s a good idea long-term.
I think Ultimate Guitar has a lot to do with this.
Sure, G is probably the most popular chord, but there are a _lot_ of chord sheets that are wrong or incomplete. If someone were to play many of these songs as charted on UG it would sound unrecognizable.
Really cool! Looking forward to checking this out.
I really like my IDE (PHPStorm) but I want Cursor-like functionality, where it’s aware of my codebase and able to make changes iteratively. It sounds like this is what I need?
> Meta could have chosen to compete with then-upstart photo sharing app Instagram in 2012, a senior FTC official said on a call with reporters ahead of the trial, but instead it bought it, and did the same with WhatsApp.
This has a potentially very-chilling effect on acquisitions, which are a major source of liquidity for lots of secondary companies.
I'd kill for a chilling effect on acquisitions. Every single fucking time something I like gets acquired, it takes anywhere between a few months to a couple years before it is completely ruined. Maybe if we're lucky, Microsoft will acquire Discord and run it into the ground the way they did with Skype. (Then, we can all go back to IRC, right? ... Right, guys?)
Its more likely we like the things we like because they're still in their "Acquire users" phase, and haven't run out of VC funding yet. Once they they get acquired, they quickly transition to the "squeeze every penny out of those users" phase we all know and love.
Gee if only there was a middle ground between these two extremes and the market somehow sought to achieve that state. Perhaps some simple market regulations might achieve this? And some enforcement of those regulations fairly and reasonably? Maybe a specific agency tasked with this?
If that's true then the downside to chilling acquisitions becomes... fewer "nice" things destined to rug-pull their users? Still not seeing the problem.
Personally, I always liked things that never had an "acquire users" phase, or VC funding, but those things are less shiny (and frankly, less user-friendly.)
Shoutout Mullvad VPN, honorable mention to Tailscale (they had an acquire users phase and VC funding but a rug pull does not seem likely for the time being).
Discord's recent UI updates (updated skins, or whatever it's called) show they can do a great job of running their own product into the ground just fine.
I don’t think we can go back to some things like ircd or mud talkers because they are too “chatty” to users. People like simplified centralized services with on screen discovery in the form of popups. The small internet will have to stay small
That'd be more than fine with me, except the small internet competes for attention with the rest of the internet and gets slaughtered by their attention-sucking applications with shiny animations, spammy push notifications, gamification and manipulative FOMO-inducing tricks. This means that the "small internet" for any given niche is very, very small, even compared to what it would've been a long time ago on a vastly smaller internet.
User retention aside... Nobody can even find the small internet. It's out there and there are search engines, but even if Google magically wasn't utterly ruined by SEO SPAM, people just don't Google their special interests as much directly anymore. (I can tell from search analytics!) So aside from a struggle to keep users engaged in small communities, there's also not very many users entering smaller communities either, certainly not enough to counteract the bleed.
>This means that the "small internet" for any given niche is very, very small, even compared to what it would've been a long time ago on a vastly smaller internet.
This has been my lived experience with a few places the past couple of years, and I love it. It's a completely different experience from the "pop web" that most people use and it's amazing.
>Nobody can even find the small internet. It's out there and there are search engines, but even if Google magically wasn't utterly ruined by SEO SPAM, people just don't Google their special interests as much directly anymore.
I know that my example can't speak for most/many other places, but the regional hiking forums I frequent (same places I alluded to above) come up a lot on search engines. Whether you're looking for "[region] hiking", or looking up "[name of] trail", or anything related to it, the pages pop up towards the top quite frequently. It's how I found them, and there does seem to be a steady number of new users joining.
Maybe it actually can be alright for a niche as relatively large as hiking, but I think it has done some real damage to smaller niches, which seem to struggle to maintain active forums.
We don't always need to know everything that happened all the time, whether it's online or meatspace happenings. If my IRC connection dropped back in the day, and there was something that happened in that timeframe that was truly worth hearing about, I'd find out eventually.
There's something to be said, at least in my opinion, about keeping a healthy dose of ephemerality in our lives.
Phones interrupt the connection every time you close the app, and if there's even a way to avoid this (yes on Android, no on iPhone) the user sees a notification that something is running in the background (fine) and their battery life is 80% less (not fine). The way IRC works is just inherently incompatible with the way mobile devices work, since IRC assumes stable endpoints. And because it's a protocol not a product, this can't be fixed.
Even if a new protocol was created which fixed this, the necessary design change would bring so much baggage that it would become Matrix. To solve the unstable endpoint problem, servers need to store messages until all endpoints retrieve them (which is never, for channels of non-trivial size, since at least one client isn't coming back) or time out (how long do you set that? a week? If you're holding all messages permanently, you might as well never time out clients).
The obvious storage design will hold each channel's messages once, not once per client connection buffer. Which means a lot of things: you might as well send it to new clients when they join; each message will have an ID so you might as well support replies and emoji reactions; you have to moderate it for illegal content; since messages have IDs, you might as well retract moderated messages on clients. At the end of the design process, what you have is nothing like IRC any more.
I know - I was a longtime IRC user way back when. You're still not quite groking my point. Lemme try and make it a bit more clear:
OP lamented that things like IRC meant that if you weren't always connected, you'd miss messages.
I simply posited, from a philosophical perspective rather than the technical perspective you are focused on, that it's OK for us to not be connected all the time. That not everything we miss is as important as we feel it might be when we think about missing out. That the truly important details will make their way to us one way or another.
No, OP lamented that a "connection interruption" means you miss messages. You were participating in a conversation, but you don't receive the whole conversation because your connection was interrupted. It's much worse on phones, because your connection is interrupted every time you look something up on the web, check the weather, send a message on another app, or anything else.
>No, OP lamented that a "connection interruption" means you "lose" messages. You were participating in a conversation, but you don't receive the whole conversation because your connection was interrupted.
Again, I know this. And please don't mis-quote OP, they clearly said "miss", just like I said.
I've told you twice, now, that you're focusing so much on the technical aspect of a connection that you are completely missing the philosophical idea I have very clearly, also twice, suggested. How IRC works, on mobile and on desktop, is not the point. I don't know how else to explain myself, so I'm gonna move on. Hope you have a pleasant day.
Edit: For posterity's sake, OP's quote at the time of this this post is...
>... if you have a connection interruption you miss messages.
IRC means relay, so it makes sense to drop messages unless the service runs a pop mail server for out of band messages. Protocol means little to the user
How is that any different than when you actually use an IRC client? You leave the chat, you leave the chat. If you're at a social gather or kick back or whatevs, if you leave the convo, the rest of the people in the group do not enter a freeze state until your return. The conversation keeps going. There's no history or log for you to scroll to catch up. You just re-enter the conversation. How you handle yourself at that point easily shows if you're nice or an asshole. Just like in IRC.
When you build a company, if you're looking to cash out and work on something else, it's either going to be by selling shares or getting acquired. Getting acquired can certainly be much less of a headache and risk vs going public or finding private investors to buy out a portion of your shares.
Most of my favorite services are either foss based or owned privately with minimal VC.
I think maybe everyone should adjust their definition of success to include treating users fairly long term instead of milking them over prolonged enshittification periods.
TBF Skype wasn't profitable when MS bought it, it every much was in the line of make something everyone wants to use and figure out how to make money later. Skype was more or less free to use and it didn't make enough from paid services to cover its operating costs if I remember correctly. So it was always someone buys it or it dies.
The point of many of those companies is to get bought out and then get enshitified or stripped for its IP and integrated into for profit products.
Discord is very much in the same boat of build user base, then either sell or lock people in and charge a lot. It's current model is unsustainable. It will get bought out or enshitify eventually, there's no other sustainable model unless every user starts handing them money every month like its Netflix.
People here used to know this, are we getting an eternal September? Comments are getting more and more "reddit" like.
> Discord is very much in the same boat of build user base, then either sell or lock people in and charge a lot. It's current model is unsustainable. It will get bought out or enshitify eventually, there's no other sustainable model unless every user starts handing them money every month like its Netflix.
I haven't looked at their financials, but I wouldn't be surprised if their current subscription offerings targeting power users were enough to support the service.
While that might be true on a systems level, individual companies can choose their own destiny and many companies have chosen to operate over long time periods while making less than maximum potential revenue.
> People here used to know this, are we getting an eternal September? Comments are getting more and more "reddit" like.
What?! I do know this, and take great offense to the insinuation that my comment is "reddit"-like. I didn't feel it necessary to iterate over how VCware works since, as you said, everyone already gets that part.
Anyway, the "this place is getting more like Reddit by the day" thing has been a Hacker News staple for (well) over a decade too. Check the end of the HN guidelines, you'll have a chuckle.
Sorry, just I thought anyone lurking here for a while was pretty familiar with the whole model of "offer service for free to gain user adoption, then sell out or pivot". Most of these services that we enjoy simply aren't sustainable and are running on borrowed time (or VC money).
I'm confused, is familiarity with it somehow an argument for it?
As I understand, the complaint was that things get ruined once acquired. Great, we all know that it's in part because of unsustainable business models in the hope of getting acquired*. Does that mean we have to like it? Wouldn't it be nice to encourage companies to have sustainable business models?
*But also not entirely. Even if you build a sustainable business model, for you it's throwing off profit and that's gravy for you. But once someone buys it from you, suddenly they are in the hole and have an investment to recoup, especially if they overpaid. And so the temptation arises to goose things to pay back that investment more quickly
Post-acquisition products can still dominate their market even if they have declining quality. E.g. they can be bundled with other offerings from the parent company. This is exactly the point of anti-trust.
Well in most cases you just ate your competition, so there's not a whole lot to care about.
The hardest part of competing with encumbants, especially when it comes to stuff like social media and IM, is acquiring users, due to those coveted network effects. When you look at what happened with Discord, it was able to swoop in when there was somewhat of a vacuum building with Microsoft-owned Skype being completely shit, MSN and AIM falling way out of fashion, and IRC... continuing to be IRC. Then they took advantage of something relatively new; they could lower the barrier to entry. Most existing IM networks required you to download a client to really use it, but Discord, just being a web app, you could log in from a browser and get the full experience. And if you needed to jump in quickly, you could literally just enter a name and start using it immediately, at least in the early days.
That doesn't happen often. What usually happens is the company that acquires the software makes use of the asset they actually care about (the users they just paid for) and now they don't have to do all of that hard work of actually acquiring the users by making a better product and marketing it. (Nevermind that they're almost certainly better-resourced to do that than the company that they are acquiring.) A large minority of users are very unhappy with the enshittification of the service, but most users don't really care much since they are pretty casual and a lot of them may not have even known things to be much better anyways. Microsoft squandering Skype seems to be the result of a lot of things at once, ranging from incompetence to the complexity that the P2P nature of Skype brought with it (at least early on.)
For example, look at Twitter. Elon Musk could do basically anything wrong but it has such a long history and so many users that it really is hard to squander it entirely, even after making many grossly unpopular moves. Don't get me wrong, Mastodon and Bluesky are doing fine, and it's also fine that neither of them are likely to ever really take over the number one spot in their niche; they still function just fine. But Twitter will always be the place where basically everything happens among them, even if the people who care the most absolutely hate the shit out of it.
I wish more acquisitions did go like Skype, only much faster.
I take one thing out of the Musk acquisition that goes beyond just being buying a product, which is that there was a real problem under Jack Dorsey that they were banning people for explicitly ideological reasons, significantly for covid "misinformation", that wasn't. Including doctors/researchers, and qualified people to speak who went away from the mainstream narrative. Like, one of the first things he did was take Jay Bhattacharya (coauthor of Great Barrington Declaration) and show him he had been put under a blacklist by the old regime of Twitter
I think the reason this gets ignored is because there's too many people on a certain part of the political spectrum where they see covid censorship as a nothingburger when actually it was a massive problem and whatever else people think of Elon I don't think you can take away from him that the situation was intolerable
I hated Twitter before and after the acquisition, for a number of reasons. The last time I really liked Twitter was probably 2015. It's hard to qualify everything that was wrong with Twitter, but it'll probably be somewhat overshadowed by the Musk era because Musk is such a big dumbass. He also didn't really resolve a lot of Twitter's old issues with ideological bias, he just replaced it with less popular ideological bias. Twitter doesn't really feel like it is any less of a hellscape where people get banned for wrongthink, it just leans differently in high profile decisions...
The large tech firms get a surprisingly large amount of hate on antitrust issues on this website for startups so I appreciate your point bc I think it’s often missed.
But then they'd have to compete and not just shovel more money into the pockets of major individual shareholders, along with the retirement and pension funds of a generation that needs to drastically scale back its post-career ambitions.
Antitrust law explicitly allows the government to unwind acquisitions if they are later determined to be anticompetitive. How else would you deal with a company like Meta who has done exactly that?
> has a potentially very-chilling effect on acquisitions
I don’t buy it. An independent Instagram would have both been another potential acquirer and a pocketful of cash for investors who might fund another round.
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