The government is claiming that Facebook bought Meta and Whatsapp because it couldn't compete with them.
Is that illegal? I don't understand! Every company that buys another company buys it because it adds something to their business. It's a ridiculous claim.
It’s an argument for how to break up the company not just a complaint about what happened. Companies that buy a supplier or customer frequently didn’t compete with that supplier so breaking them off wouldn’t break up the monopoly.
Whatsapp was purchased as a competition and therefore there’s a solid case for spitting the company along that line. Split off Instagram and things look even more competitive.
> Every company that buys another company buys it because it adds something to their business.
The point is that they didn't acquire those companies to add to their business, they acquired them because their continued independent existence detracted from their business. Also known as competition.
What are you basing that on? Instagram is clearly their preferred app at least in the US. It definitely bolstered their business. And they obviously invested heavily into it post acquisition.
I dislike meta but wouldnt call their ownership of instagram anti competitive monopolistic.
Yes, trying to beat your competition by buying them is incredibly illegal and should be illegal. If you have 70% of a market and an up-and-comer is now at 25% but growing, a market leader purchasing their competitor to maintain their market position is an anti-competitive move and why we don't and shouldn't allow every single horizontal or vertical or conglomerate merger.
>it because it adds something to their business. It's a ridiculous claim.
"It" and "Something" are incredibly vague and meaningless. Their vacuousness is what allows you to not understand the illegal behavior.
Companies buy/merge competitors all the time that passes FTC legal review. E.g. Boeing acquired competitor McDonnell Douglas. Hewlett-Packard acquired Compaq Computer.
And sometimes US government encourages mergers. E.g. US asks stronger bank buy a weaker competitor bank. It's been leaked that the US Govt is encouraging competitors Intel and AMD to merge ... so the USA semiconductor industry can be stronger and thus, less dependent on Taiwan TSMC and stay ahead of China.
> Companies buy/merge competitors all the time that passes FTC legal review. E.g. Boeing acquired competitor McDonnell Douglas. Hewlett-Packard acquired Compaq Computer.
These are mergers that were allowed, but probably shouldn't have been because their industries were already quite consolidated by that point.
The ones that should be okay is when e.g. a company with 4% market share wants to buy a company with 0.5% market share. Companies merging when they each already have double digit percentages of the market is craziness.
> It's been leaked that the US Govt is encouraging competitors Intel and AMD to merge ... so the USA semiconductor industry can be stronger and thus, less dependent on Taiwan TSMC and stay ahead of China.
This sort of thinking is a demonstration of incompetence. AMD and Intel can both design competitive processors. AMD sold their fabs and now has the processors made by TSMC. Intel still makes them but their manufacturing process has fallen behind, to the point that they too have used TSMC to make some of their products. Saddling AMD with Intel's uncompetitive process would only put them both at a disadvantage against other competitors using TSMC.
The real problem here is that Intel was too vertically integrated and focused on producing only its own designs on its fabs, and then abandoned the low end of the market to sustain its margins. Which allowed TSMC to capture enough market share that the larger volume gave them enough capital to take the lead.
What the US needs is not mergers but the opposite -- its own TSMC as a competitive contract fab that can do the volumes needed to sustain a state of the art process.
You don't know if they're doing their job from a photo. Perhaps they're replying to constituents, reading the details of the law they are being asked to vote on, checking with colleagues on the status of votes, etc. You don't know. It's just harassment without facts.
If all you're doing is building a project management app, yeah it's easy to be profitable.
The trick is when you're trying to take risks and innovate. It took Amazon a long time to be profitable. It took Uber a long time to be profitable. It took Facebook a long time to be profitable.
When it's a land grab - when you're racing against other companies in a new market like AI - you need to burn money fast to run fast. Can't take a year in private beta.
You could dismiss almost any company as "if all you're doing is building an X app...". It's a no-true-Scotsman argument.
Even setting that aside, not everything is or should be a land grab. It's notable that all the examples you provided — Amazon (at least, its initial online store product), Uber, Facebook — are all B2C plays and I don't think that's a coincidence.
I tried to ask examples of this yesterday[1], but afaik the patterns seems to be think throwing money at the problems works in undifferentiated, maybe transactional categories like food delivery, ride share, e-commerce etc where the software is not the product, it's just the payment method or the market place. The market places are also localized so you have these countless local turf wars, until you regain some kind of dominance or balance. Then deep tech, hardware etc is harder where you need large initial investment. Social networks because they need the critical mass, and usually there isn't a direct business model available.
I'd argue most b2b/enterprise software is a new version of something that already exists or addressing a need that already has a market. Business model is also very clear, there is very little network effects usually other than reputation and customer proof. Yet most the startups not even close being profitable.
In my mind most software products are differentiated so in the end the main success comes from getting the differentiation right for the market, not outspending the competition.
All three of those examples strategically traded profitability for marketshare, and at a time when money was very cheap. This is what is meant by "prioritize growth over everything else."
That is not today's environment.
When it's the focus, profitability can be easily achieved somewhere between day 1 and month 18.
Same here. I specifically remember staying home "sick" from school just so I could transfer those COMPUTE! programs from paper to screen and eventually to cassette tape! Still have the entire setup except for the 13" Montgomery Ward TV it was connected to. I owe my entire tech career to my parents buying me that little TI from Shopko in 1983.
An old employee using his home printer in 2024 to print up old mockups sounds more exclusive than actual prototypes from the 90s? What is your reasoning there?
Old employee prints out old mockups, fools everyone when he has them graded and sold at auction is also an exciting and rare story. Rare and interesting enough to make the rounds beyond the pokemon scene (as evidenced by us talking about it).
I'd agree that original prototypes would be cooler and more exclusive, but these cards are also unique thanks to the events around them. They are not just any contemporary printouts
The story is rare and interesting, sure. And you get to attach that story to 1-5 lots of cards before it gets real old and the value of those cards craters.
With legitimate prototype cards, you can have thousands of them retain value.
Well, depends on how many there are, who made them, if there's anything unique about them, and if the process is repeatable. If it's repeatable then that exclusivity goes out the window.
