Comment by lagniappe
3 months ago
>Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.
The reality of the situation is: If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.
> The reality of the situation is: If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.
The key words are monopoly and lock-in. Those things can really scramble the bad vs good equation.
Does Microsoft actually have a monopoly on anything these days? Maybe gaming? I saw its like 95% windows on Steam.
> Does Microsoft actually have a monopoly on anything these days? Maybe gaming? I saw its like 95% windows on Steam.
Monopoly doesn't always mean 100% of the market. They're still the leader by far in desktop operating systems, and pretty much everyone who has a computer as work has an Office license allocated to them.
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> Maybe gaming
Only if you limit scope desktop gaming, sure. 75% of gaming market share is on mobile and consoles.
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No, that's not the reality of the situation. You are theorizing a perfect market with no costs of entry or exit. Customer demand for critical systems is inelastic to start with due to technical burden (ie most people are not good enough with computers to casually switch OS), and large vendors work hard to maximize that inelasticity.
By "not good enough" you mean "not motivated enough" which boils down to what the OP said. It's not a big problem in reality for most people.
No I don't. If meant that I would have written it. Most people are not competent to change out an operating system and find the idea of developing that competency unattractive and expensive. Many people not only do not understand how computers work, they don't want to. If they do switch to something different, it's usually via a purchase rather than DIY.
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> If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.
The problem is that while this is true, in practice it's more like the mandate of heaven than laissez-faire economics. When political power structures are involved, and thus the status quo itself is reliant on the omnipresence of certain economic forces, there can never be a drawdown under normal market forces. There is an intentional, exerted force which unbalances the equation in favor of the monoliths. "Enough of a problem" ends up becoming violent social upheaval. In effect, you advocate for normalizing the driver to aim our societal bus off the cliff because "somebody hasn't grabbed the steering wheel yet, so it's clearly an acceptable course." Discounting the fact that the co-driver is pointing a machine gun at the back of the bus.
Adam Smith would be absolutely apalled that we let things get this bad. This isn't what he wrote about at all. The free market is about economic coordination, not letting massive entities do whatever they damn well please at the expense of a society's quality. This is neo-mercantilism, the exact kind of thing he was vehemently disgusted with.
I don't recall the Soviets building higher quality products.
That is an extreme, also undesirable alternative. How about just having a reasonable level of market regulation, especially monopoly regulation?
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If you care about high quality products we can start with the OP article and how this system, which is most definitely not capitalism as intended, has directly entailed this nosedive of enshittification for absolutely superfluous and nonsensical reasons. The Soviets succumbed to the exact same mistake, I'm not sure why you would bring them up.
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> Adam Smith would be absolutely appalled that we let things get this bad. This isn't what he wrote about at all. The free market is about economic coordination, not letting massive entities do whatever they damn well please at the expense of a society's quality. This is neo-mercantilism, the exact kind of thing he was vehemently disgusted with.
One problem is that the ambient propaganda has changed the definition of capitalism to exactly the problematic one you describe, so that arguing for a more sensible balance of the kind that Smith and others described is taken as an attack on capitalism itself.
These days I'm reminded more and more often of Wimp Lo from Kung Pow! Enter the Fist: "We have purposely trained him wrong, as a joke." Except people have been trained wrong to make them better targets for farming their capital.