> But it also reflects the willingness of shareholders and deep-pocketed private investors to keep fast-growing upstarts afloat long enough to conquer a potential “winner-take-all” market.
That's the gamble. Destroy competition, get lock in, become a monopolist and the free market is your money printing machine. If regulators had teeth to break up such monopolies, we wouldn't be seeing these gambles, and maybe more honest competition.
This strategy only works if you can effecticely build new habits that are sticky enough to persist when the friction increases. Even better is if the new behavior has interesting interactions with other things.
The reason enterprise tools tend to be “worse” is because the stickiness is arbitrarily enforced instead of being rooted in reality. Uber/lyft are non-sticky because theyre basically the same.
That's the gamble. Destroy competition, get lock in, become a monopolist and the free market is your money printing machine. If regulators had teeth to break up such monopolies, we wouldn't be seeing these gambles, and maybe more honest competition.