5 Comments
Dec 4, 2021Liked by David Hugh-Jones

Mom and pop might be using Shopify and Stripe to compete with Amazon, but Shopify runs on Google Cloud and Stripe on AWS. Big tech is still brewing everyone's potions.

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I don't think big tech firms are going away. The argument is that they might cease to be dominant, one-stop shops that "do everything". Amazon is probably the best example.

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Dec 4, 2021Liked by David Hugh-Jones

yes, because we're not all there yet. I like the "The magic becomes mundane." a lot, but we have to differentiate that from replacing magic by even more magically magic. We could e.g. reduce the complexity of blogging for individuals to signing a hosting-contract and copying a single file to begin with. The crucial question is, how to fund such non-fundable tech.

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Jan 18, 2022Liked by David Hugh-Jones

Once cloud hosting can be done in a FOSS manner, GCloud and AWS is toast. Then again Financial Maintenance, SysAdmining and putting up with regulations will be a priority.

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Dec 5, 2021Liked by David Hugh-Jones

Referring Ben Thompson's "Facebook Political Problems"; A company like FB can cause damage to Amazon eCommerce more than anything else:

"I am, given my career, biased in this regard, but the rise of platforms like Shopify, Etsy, Substack, and the App Store is evidence that new careers can be built and untold niches filled when the entire world is your addressable market. The challenge in a worldwide market, though, is finding the customers who are interested in the niche being filled; this is where Facebook’s ad offering is very much a platform in its own right.

Facebook, via its integration with a host of third party sites and apps, makes it possible for those sites and apps to collectively understand and target prospective customers with the same sort of proficiency that first-data powerhouses like Google and Amazon do , and they don’t need to hold or understand any third-party data to do so. It is difficult to overstate what a big deal this is: suddenly a Shopify merchant can compete with Amazon, a D2C startup with Unilever, or a blog with the New York Times."

source: https://stratechery.com/2021/facebook-political-problems/

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