<story><title>An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft</title><url>https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/an-economy-of-godzillas-salesforce</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chii</author><text>&amp;gt; we run the risk of creating separate product areas and none of them working well together&lt;p&gt;or, have mandated open apis that _force_ products to integrate.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s what the web is today (mostly). Links, and embedable content (like frames). APIs and data.&lt;p&gt;The reason companies don&amp;#x27;t do this - as demonstrated fairly recently by google with their removal of xmpp protocols from google chat - is that open apis prevent lock. Open apis allows others to compete, and it is not in the interest of the existing incumbent.&lt;p&gt;IBM made a crucial mistake that apple didn&amp;#x27;t make when IBM opened the specs for their IBM compatible machines and drove down the price of PCs to what you see today - otherwise, i would predict that PCs would be just as expensive and incompatible as apple computers were.</text></item><item><author>cafed00d</author><text>&amp;gt; it gave away its new product for no or low cost to existing clients, and bundled it with existing product lines. In a society with functional antitrust laws, such activity would be illegal. But alas.&lt;p&gt;I find this statement highly suspect. What kind of world do we want to live in where regulators delineate product areas.&lt;p&gt;I see Microsoft integrating Teams into their productivity product bundle as feature; not a bug. Otherwise, we run the risk of creating separate product areas and none of them working well together — it’a going to be a minor pain in the butt to email &amp;lt;user@outlook.com&amp;gt; with the pdf tchalla@ shared on Slack; deal with formatted paste&amp;#x2F;copy &amp;amp; whatever else issues.&lt;p&gt;I mean, products being integrated is the whole MO of companies like Apple, Tesla and literally every other company making physical things. Sure, you can sacrifice the integration for other features like breadth of choice, specialized user needs etc, but proposing regulations to keep them distinct and separate?! That modesty sound right, imho</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cafed00d</author><text>&amp;gt; or, have mandated open apis that _force_ products to integrate.&lt;p&gt;Yep, I mostly agree. Except, defining APIs is pretty much the realm of software engineering more than regulations.&lt;p&gt;I mean, we don&amp;#x27;t want to have regulations that essentially say: 
&amp;quot;all companies selling platforms (god knows how we&amp;#x27;re going to accurately define what a platform is; let&amp;#x27;s ignore that for now) must support development against open apis such as HTML 5&amp;quot; and then realize that 5 years later nobody wants to write apps in HTML 5 but the shiny new thing called Flash that Adobe has developed. (My memory fails me; Flash is the hot new thing right? :P)&lt;p&gt;Anyways, it feels like society has reached a point where regulators need software skills if they&amp;#x27;re going to tackle societal impact of big tech. We need super smart folks from software _also_ become super smart folks in law and become members of congress. :D Or, maybe we need congress to sign up for #learntocode. Cross-functional skills FTW!</text></comment>
<story><title>An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft</title><url>https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/an-economy-of-godzillas-salesforce</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chii</author><text>&amp;gt; we run the risk of creating separate product areas and none of them working well together&lt;p&gt;or, have mandated open apis that _force_ products to integrate.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s what the web is today (mostly). Links, and embedable content (like frames). APIs and data.&lt;p&gt;The reason companies don&amp;#x27;t do this - as demonstrated fairly recently by google with their removal of xmpp protocols from google chat - is that open apis prevent lock. Open apis allows others to compete, and it is not in the interest of the existing incumbent.&lt;p&gt;IBM made a crucial mistake that apple didn&amp;#x27;t make when IBM opened the specs for their IBM compatible machines and drove down the price of PCs to what you see today - otherwise, i would predict that PCs would be just as expensive and incompatible as apple computers were.</text></item><item><author>cafed00d</author><text>&amp;gt; it gave away its new product for no or low cost to existing clients, and bundled it with existing product lines. In a society with functional antitrust laws, such activity would be illegal. But alas.&lt;p&gt;I find this statement highly suspect. What kind of world do we want to live in where regulators delineate product areas.&lt;p&gt;I see Microsoft integrating Teams into their productivity product bundle as feature; not a bug. Otherwise, we run the risk of creating separate product areas and none of them working well together — it’a going to be a minor pain in the butt to email &amp;lt;user@outlook.com&amp;gt; with the pdf tchalla@ shared on Slack; deal with formatted paste&amp;#x2F;copy &amp;amp; whatever else issues.&lt;p&gt;I mean, products being integrated is the whole MO of companies like Apple, Tesla and literally every other company making physical things. Sure, you can sacrifice the integration for other features like breadth of choice, specialized user needs etc, but proposing regulations to keep them distinct and separate?! That modesty sound right, imho</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cnity</author><text>&amp;gt; That&amp;#x27;s what the web is today&lt;p&gt;Are you suggesting that the web is the way it is today because benevolent governments dictated it be so? Do you have any links about this?</text></comment>