The issue is the near zero marginal cost of software makes it easy to dominate entire lines business. Technology itself allows businesses to become huge because once they have a solution, they can implement it at near zero cost everywhere and so competitors can’t really compete. Like Walmart/target/Costco versus little Main Street stores, or Home Depot/Lowe’s versus independent hardware stores, etc.
Smaller operators will have high marginal costs and higher prices, and will never be able to compete with bigger operations that can utilize software and other technology to offer the absolute lowest prices.
Although, in other businesses like retail, this results in single digit profit margins at best, whereas in software, due to the minimal labor needed and protections of copyright and obfuscation and network effects, the tech companies can maintain much bigger profit margins.
Yeah indeed the margins are high. In the case of google/FB, they are so high, that paying back users with "free services" doesn't cut it anymore. Even the cost of running those free services has gone way down. At this point users shouldbe getting paid for having their data used. That way, a potential competitor could outright buy the users directly (instead of paying FB/Google for advertising to acquire users). Unfortunately there's no legal framework for that yet.
No other industry except perhaps finance has the potential to cheaply scale as IT. I wonder what antimonopoly actions have been in finance in the past (finance seems to have been a lot more regulated since forever)
Maybe I am all special or something. For me, it is 300 points or more per day.
Yes, a few years back they changed the points ratio on that end. It used to take about 500 points to get a $5 gift card and now it is 5250 points.
But they also fiddled with things on the other end.
At least for me. Maybe Bill Gates likes me or something and told his people "Make sure that pathetic homeless woman can earn $10 per month as my generous gift to her."
I earn a $5 gift card about once every two weeks-ish. I'm poor enough that matters to me, so it is something I am very aware of. That $5 gift card is sometimes still all the money I have for the day, though I'm less desperately poor than when I was homeless.
I don't know what else to tell you. Your info sounds out of date to me, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Maybe you are using Bing on desktop, mobile (iOS), with their extension, making Edge your default browser, and doing all daily bonus activities? So altogether it's selling your info and some of your attention.
I was just doing it passively on one computer without extensions.
Smaller operators will have high marginal costs and higher prices, and will never be able to compete with bigger operations that can utilize software and other technology to offer the absolute lowest prices.
Although, in other businesses like retail, this results in single digit profit margins at best, whereas in software, due to the minimal labor needed and protections of copyright and obfuscation and network effects, the tech companies can maintain much bigger profit margins.