Instagram might not became that big, but it definitely was on track to become somewhat big, that's why Facebook bought it, in fear of competition.
Same, Youtube might go down, but the idea was out of the box now, someone else would do that. Technology (ContentID) was there as well. As a consumer, I don't mind if it'd be called differently done by different team. It might have been better or worse of course.
Instagram c. 2012 was just burning VC money and had no plans for how it could be profitable. It wasn't until Facebook bought them that there was some thought about how to make it profitable.
> On Thursday, the company announced that it would begin introducing photo and video advertisements on the service, its first attempt to generate revenue since Facebook acquired the startup for $1 billion.
> ...
> It’s a sentiment Systrom has repeated to me for years–and an idea that many revenue-free startups have begun parroting. For entrepreneurs without a business model, it’s become almost fashionable to declare that they’re simply creating a new model altogether: Whatever it is–by god–won’t involve pesky traditional ads. No! The ads won’t be disruptive or annoying–they’ll be wanted and loved! (I’m waiting for the call, SnapChat.) But when push comes to shove, more often than not, the ads turn out to be nothing more than, well, traditional advertisements. See: any Promoted Tweets.
Yes, it was on track to be something big... but it wasn't on track to be able to make any money and was more likely to flounder once it ran out of VC interest and get bought for cheap by Twitter.
There's a reason that chart only starts listing revenue in 2015.
While Instagram might have been keeping Zuckerberg up at night with nightmares - one shouldn't pretend that it had a path to making money and being able to keep running.
And in a world where competition is allowed to see its course, Instagram would have disappeared. And further down the line, Facebook's poor decisions would have spelled oblivion for them too.
It also means the 2010s may have perhaps seen investors print billions into businesses that actually matter and deliver real innovation
If Instagram would have disappeared on its own, Facebook would have just built it in house. They spent $1 billion on it because it was cheaper to do that than to start from scratch. And how could anti-trust possibly stop that?
That's just wrong. It doesn't cost $1 billion to copy instagram, at most it'd cost a few million. By buying them, you not only get the app/feature set - more importantly you also remove them from the market as a competitor. This is exactly what we're seeing play out with tiktok. If FB could have bought tiktok, they would have - they couldn't, so they cloned it for far less than $1bil (fb reels) - but now we have a situation of two competing services that users can compare and contrast and prefer. The market it segmented. Which is bad for facebook's shareholders, but good for users, workers, and advertisers. This is exactly why we need good anti-trust
They really haven't. They've been acquiring startups, digesting and rebranding said startups innovations with an in house version, and (arguably innovating) in finding ways to plaster a transaction layer into solved problems that previously lacked a recurring revenue compatible transaction framework.
In short, subsidizing themselves by abandoning one time purchasable software, and replacing it with either ad serving or subscription based versions.
Monopolizing a vertical supply chain isn't even a concept that makes sense. The point is that with a monopoly customers have only one purchasing option. This condition does not exist when a company integrates vertically.
You're arguing the semantics of a monopoly, but you should just mentally replace the word "monopoly" with "market power".
When Apple buys components from a vendor, they have less market power. When they build their own components, they have more market power.
Both Apple and Amazon shipped their own ARM chips. This increased their market power. Because they're the only companies with access to those chips. Meanwhile, independent ARM vendors go out of business about once every 3 months because the biggest companies using ARM aren't part of their addressable market. Which means small companies have limited access to ARM CPUs.
When Amazon builds their own delivery company, they increase their market power. When they buy from Fedex and UPS, they decrease their market power. And, when they do their own deliveries, they limit competitors market power.
You can be fine with all of this. Those of us who are interested in competitive markets worry about it a lot. You don't have to be worried about competitive markets, though. It's totally valid to not think increased competition is a good thing.
There is a lot of nuance here. If you're stuck on the word monopoly, I don't think you're going to really hear the things antitrust folks have to say.
> When Apple buys components from a vendor, they have less market power. When they build their own components, they have more market power
So now you’re saying a company shouldn’t be allowed to build and design their own components? Doesn’t it help competition that Apple, Microsoft, Google, Qualcomm, and MediaTek among others are creating and modifying their own processors?
> Which means small companies have limited access to ARM CPUs.
Any company can buy an ARM processor from Qualcomm and MediaTek. Have you looked at all of the phone manufacturers who sell in China and India and even the US?
> Those of us who are interested in competitive markets worry about it a lot. You don't have to be worried about competitive markets, though. It's totally valid to not think increased competition is a good thing.
Every market you mentioned has a competitor that third parties can go to - ARM chips, delivery companies etc.
Vertical integration doesn't decrease competition, it increases it. If there are N companies in a market, and a company that purchases from one decides to vertically integrate.and enter the market, now there are N+1.
Almost no one who vertically integrates competes in the market they just shook. You can't get Amazon to ship things for you, so they don't compete with Fedex and UPS. You can't by an M1 chip from Apple.
Vertical integration is all about shrinking markets, not adding to them.
What can Apple make? What must Apple buy from other suppliers? How much are investors allowed to punish Apple's stock price (like they are currently encountering https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/01/08/why-is-apple-sto... ) or can they buy everything a company produces? Are others allowed to buy a company that only has Apple as a client and raise the prices?
Can Amazon work at improving distribution center efficiency with technology that they create? Or must they buy it from someone else?
Must Google create a business unit to sell its highly customized routers?
One could argue that they are purchasing companies to incorporate them into the company's product directly rather than relying on a 3rd party vendor to supply it.
The argument (I believe) is for leaving those companies as stand alone and having Apple and Amazon rely upon them not going bankrupt or getting purchased by some other competitor and disrupting their own company.
You've seen that happen before - BigCo is using a 3rd party vendor, someone buys it and then turns around and starts charging BigCo lots of money.
To prevent that from happening, BigCo should have bought the company when it started using it (if possible) to prevent that disruption in its systems, products, or services.
You're not really making coherent points here. No one is arguing that vertical monopolization corners a market on components.
When Apple bought Authentec, they increased their market power and reduced the market power of competitors.
As an independent company, Authentec could sell to Apple AND Apple's competitors. Apple obviously won't sell components to their competitors. They were incentivized to purchase Authentect to restrict competition.
So no one is arguing that a “vertical monopoly” corners the market. In that case, what are they monopolizing?
> When Apple bought Authentec, they increased their market power and reduced the market power of competitors.
The existence proof is that there were fingerprint authentication methods before and after the acquisition. Who exactly did they hurt?
> As an independent company, Authentec could sell to Apple AND Apple's competitors. Apple obviously won't sell components to their competitors. They were incentivized to purchase Authentect to restrict competition.
Well if that was the purpose - to prevent competitors from having fingerprint sensors - they did a horrible job.
In that model, would it be reasonable for another agency (company, PE, billionaire with an axe to grind) to come along and buy them and then raise the prices to rent seek on Apple?
You appear to be arguing that larger companies shouldn't be able to secure their supply chain and instead be forced to follow the whims of the market as companies go in and out of business forcing the larger company to either (a) build it in house or (b) keep redesigning every time something changes.
One thing about antitrust is that it's a set of restrictions only applies to companies with a certain amount of market power. It's not a set of rules that are designed to be fair for everyone.
So, yes, some other company could conceivably do something to diminish Apple's market power and not run afoul of antitrust. And I think that's ok?
Companies with too much market power should not be able to vertically integrate to increase their market power. They definitely should not be able to do this via M&A.
This is, again, not meant to be "fair". Because there's no such thing. Companies of a certain size are inherently unfair competition, antitrust rules just limit how they can flex.
Anti trust has nothing to do with market power in the US.
There has never been any restriction on “vertically integrating” and you have not shown where competitors are unable to buy alternatives because of it. That includes ARM chips, fingerprint sensors and every other component that Apple uses.
> Yes because Skype and GitHub are market leaders and it’s really hard to change your git origin.
Yes, for exactly those reasons. Have you actually tried getting everyone on a team to change their git origin? And that's before mentioning the other stuff you have to migrate: the issue tracker, the CI pipeline…
Hardly anyone uses GitHub’s rudimentary issue tracker and reconfiguring a CI/CD pipeline is child’s play unless you use GitHub actions and very few if any large companies use GitHub actions.
Ok, well, we're not talking about the same stuff here so I'm not sure it's worth going back and forth. We can just continue to be on different sides of the antitrust issue/
YouTube’s issue wasn’t just being sued, the storage and bandwidth costs are huge and YouTube was losing billions. Rumors are that YouTube is still not profitable.
YouTube took years and only became slightly profitable after burning through billions of Google’s money and then only by piggybacking off of Google’s existing infrastructure and ad network.
Price dumping is a bigger deal when it's a company in a monopoly position doing it. It's not necessarily anti competitive to sell at below cost.
YouTube could have been profitable by charging for their services. Like Vimeo. They could not have been profitable with ads. Google couldn't afford for YouTube to be small, they needed a near monopoly on internet video to extend their ad empire.
>YouTube could have been profitable by charging for their services. Like Vimeo.
Fyi, Vimeo was a money-losing business when IAC bought it 2006 and is still unprofitable after IAC spun it out as a public company in May 2021.
So it's not convincing that Youtube could have stayed independent and become profitable by charging for videos. Before the Google acquisition, Youtube was also threatened by the billion dollar Viacom lawsuit. The young Youtube startup didn't have the money to fight expensive legal battles like that and could realistically lose in court like Napster lost against the RIAA lawsuit.
Youtube getting acquired by Google got the video startup out of several fires: (1) switch to Google's datacenter infrastructure which reduces operating costs (2) tap into Google's extensive ad network to monetize (3) use Google's army of lawyers to settle with Viacom by convincing them that the ContentID fingerprinting algorithm will filter out piracy.
Google over-leveraged advertising on Youtube however. Most Youtube viewers use an adblocker on PC, and adblock is becoming more common on Android with each passing month. All because AdSense went with a more lax policy of moderation for ads after the 2017 fallout caused by Matt Watson scared away big advertisers like Frito-Lay and Toyota. The result was all ads were either falsely advertised Android games, multi-level marketing scams, or even nakedly racist political ads in the runup to the 2018 congressional elections. Adblock rates exploded, cutting Youtube's income and causing a panic response of running even more ads and locking users into seeing them. To this day Youtube still has a lax vetting policy for advertising partners, and actively hateful, harmful, or overtly false ads stay up for weeks until enough users report them.
As for subscriptions... Well, they tried that with Youtube Red. And then Youtube Premium. And then Youtube Music. Every time people turned it down, because the benefits weren't worth the cost each month considering all the features touted could be found legally for free elsewhere. And when video creators outed Red by showing they'd get a paltry amount of that revenue, despite Youtube saying the money from subscriptions would be used to pay them, even more of the viewing audience turned against it.
When you're in the uniquely precarious position of hosting high cost user-generated content, it's very easy for outside forces to break you over their knee and send you into a death spiral.
Not always, if rebars are pre-tensioned before concrete solidifies. So the rebar is always under tension. Pretty common in prefab parts, like bridge bars.
pre-stressed concrete is great, and has many advantages over regular reinforced concrete and is more efficient in terms of cross section so cracks less. It still cracks, though, and in different locations like on the ends horizontally instead of at high moment/deflection areas vertically. Pre-stressed does experience fewer shrinkage cracks, which is nice. It's more expensive to build and repair.
And while you absolutely have pretensioned girders on bridges commonly, the bridge decks generally aren't, although they're almost always completely in compression and the steel is there for shrinkage cracks etc.
For someone totally outside this space I had assumed concrete is rigid and brittle and rebar reinforcement allows for it to bend and flex without breaking. But your comment makes it feel like it keeps the concrete in tension with compression forces to make it sturdier. Can you ELI5 what the rebar does to help?
You're going to love this playlist from Practical Engineering [1]. Grady explains all of this much better than I could. The second video explains reinforcement and the fifth explains pre-stressing.
you have it backwards. The reinforcement handles tensile stress, keeping more of the concrete section in compression, where its strong. In concrete where the reinforcing isn't tensioned, the concrete below the reinforcing will crack as it is very weak in tension. In concrete that is pretensioned, the tension in the rebar is used to apply compression on the concrete so that it might never get into a tensile load and crack, which also reduces deflection under load.
The rebar handles tensile loads, the concrete handles compressive loads. You put the rebar where tension will exist so that it can handle that. Some amount of cracking on non-pretensioned concrete is normal and unavoidable.
Well, technically, you can use cement instead of mortar (wet, but without sand). As far as I understand, sand is more like a neutral filler, to save money on cement. Various other things can be used to fill as well, like gravel. Sometimes even empty plastic bottles (reduces material and weight) are suitable (just make sure they don't float up). If one got very smooth bricks (e.g. precisely cut aerated concrete), then it might make sense, as there's very tiny amount of mortar (or even glue) is needed anyway.
If the sand is properly coarse, it can add strength. However, finding coarse sand is increasingly difficult, resulting in misuse of smooth sand (from error or being defrauded).
Tangent: coarse sand is also important for certain types of septic systems to function properly.
Kotlin has it, but only if the function accepts the function argument, e.g.
`foo({println("hello")})` is the same as `foo {println("hello")}` (larger example in my other comment above).
You can also make it on no-args function, if it's a method (attached to a type). Utilizing @get(), like that: `3.mph` and have somewhere else defined
Absolutely damned is combination of Kotlin's several features:
1. Lambda functions can be defined with `{}`.
2.`foo(bar, somefunc)` is the same as `foo(bar) somefunc`. In other words, if the last parameter is a function, it can be provided AFTER closing parenthesis.
3. Interfaces that require only one method can be implemented on-side with a lambda function (i.e. `{}` syntax for no-param function).
Combined those three features, the code may look like that:
I don't know why teenagers insist on taking a negative work and making it positive, especially when teenagers don't like adding emphasis to words so you have no idea whether they think it's good or bad.
Not that I was completely innocent of this at that age.
It reminds me of Scala too, but I have no idea which started when. And of course both could have come up with this fairly independently. (After all it is the norm in functional style.)
Kotlin was started even as just a poor Scala clone. (Because JetBrains didn't manage to get a working Scala plugin for their IDE, so they thought it would be simpler to create their own "simpler" version of the language).
Kotlin's features are amazing for designing DSLs but I think your code sample uses more than just the 3 points you mentioned. Specifically the `call.respondText(..)` part. I assume that in this example the second argument to the `get` function is actually a "lambda with receiver", which means that the lambda executes with another object as the receiver (and that object is bound to "this" inside the lambda block), which makes the `call` object available.
> 2.foo(bar, somefunc) is the same as foo(bar) somefunc. In other words, if the last parameter is a function, it can be provided AFTER closing parenthesis.
Just a irregular syntax quirk that tries to get around the fact that Kotlin does not support multiple parameter lists, like the language where most Kotlin features come form, Scala.
> 3. Interfaces that require only one method can be implemented on-side with a lambda function (i.e. {} syntax for no-param function).
That doesn't have anything to do with Kotlin. That's Javas SAM (Single Abstract Method) feature.
> I'm surprised author didn't mention it.
The author seems not to know any Scala. Otherwise the lists would show mostly only Scala features… ;-)
Were falling through the computer literacy gap between SMS MFA and authenticator/Yubikey MFA at the moment. While an IT person can do password managers (with secure backups) authenticators, passkeys, and biometrics, all with half-decent opsec, the average user can barely do more than a couple of passwords for everything, and SMS MFA.
It's absolutely critical that the companies we support vastly improve their security, but there's no way to get there from here with their staff, lack of any established processes, and zero training infrastructure.
