Comment by alephnerd
19 days ago
I'm not sure I buy Thiel's argument becuase plenty of their non-search businesses such as Google Cloud, GSuite, Waymo, and Verily have become pretty successful in their own right, and vertical integration is another form of monopoly that tends to cracked down on.
If I had a monopoly on sugar and traded in silver and healthcare, I would still have a monopoly on sugar.
Yea but diversification is a critical business strategy not just a marketing ploy
Yeah there are far cheaper ways to “distract” from a monopoly than building Waymo from scratch. Alleging that whole project exists only as a smokescreen is pretty conspiratorial thinking.
6 replies →
Check out the big blue box. I think Thiel's point is spot on:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093781/distribution-of-...
Vertical integration is very proconsumer as it reduces successive markups.
Until they drive competitors out of business, and then it's not. Much like the horizontal integration of, say, Walmart.
When the prices are low it's predatory, the same it's collusion and higher it's exploiting the monopoly.