Home delivery is not going anywhere, and like I said, even if a behemoth like Amazon tried, they would lose their entire business overnight. Not doing home delivery isn’t sustainable because customers will not do business with you, and every business that tries deserves the guaranteed bankruptcy.

The world has improved. Not having packages delivered to my doorstep is as regressive as it would be to walk miles to a well with a bucket. Someone who would ask either now that there’s a better way is not someone I will do business with.

You’re free to opt in to having your time wasted if you want.

Well I just learned Moz died :(

No way I wouldn’t check it out though. There were some points in the middle where it felt like it fell off, but it ended strong.

OK, they can add $1 to the price of the car for a lifetime subscription (and no the load probably will never add up to that).

I can’t get in to see the methodology, but I just fundamentally have a hard time buying that there’s going to be an approach that actually addresses the confounding variables in any way. The sample size is way too small for how massive the variance is between whatever you consider “extremely similar” games.

It’s literally never happened to me and, if it did, is still less inconvenient than waiting for a delivery one single time. It’s as simple as contacting the retailer and getting a replacement shipped in a day or two for anyone big. The worst case is maybe a week.

All of that is better than going out of my way to go to a pickup location or staying home waiting for a package.

OK, in the rest of the world you have dogshit service. Why is that relevant to the fact that Americans are unwilling to do business with companies that don’t respect our time?

Stolen packages aren’t an actual problem at any scale, and I’m willing to bet shrinkage from theft is meaningfully lower than it is in physical stores. Expecting people to sit around all day waiting for deliveries is a terrible trade off for a rounding error worth of loss to the retailer.

Call it what you want; anyone who changed their policy would go bankrupt overnight as they lost 95% of their sales volume, because no one else does that silly nonsense.

You’re free to waste time going to pick up “deliveries”, and this has more or less always been the case. But that’s a dealbreaker for the vast majority of the population, because no other competitor will pull that nonsense.

Most of us wouldn’t buy from someone who made us jump through hoops like that.

There’s always an algorithm.

Sequential order with no weighting for what you care about is just a particularly bad one.

The problem is SEO.

You can’t just use keywords anymore because every site out there is actively exploiting that system. Being the search engine everyone uses inherently means everyone will try to cheat to be overrepresented. It’s an adversarial system now, which forces an arms race between the search engine and web sites, meaning a search engine has to constantly evolve to stay ahead.

They’ve failed to do that and I definitely don’t like the end product now, but there’s nothing they can do to be what they were 10 years ago either. The web has changed.

Did people think that not connecting to a network was a magic technique that prevented infections from being spread on USB drives if you move them back and forth?

Controlling what happens on your systems is not anti-competitive. You can’t just re-define words to mean something that’s the exact opposite of what they are. The locked down system of Apple and consoles is their biggest value add. It’s not “something I tolerate to buy an iPhone”. It’s why I buy an iPhone. They make so much money because their control of their own product makes it better. There is no such thing as a “monopoly” on your own hardware. It’s literally impossible.

Google is a monopoly because they are controlling the behavior of competitors with their market position. That is always a monopoly. Controlling your own product never is.

It has nothing to do with the OS. It’s for the play store. But again, a limitation of the OS would be something that the OS can’t do, not the OS just refusing to allow hardware for business reasons.

Your opinion on rational is just as flawed. People should be able to make their own products. It’s specifically pretending to be open to form a standard that multiple independent companies join in on, then unilaterally controlling that standard to make decisions for the entire market that’s abusive.

There are many companies that do what Apple does and run closed operating systems on their own hardware. Apple built their market share on the strength of their walled garden providing an excellent development environment. It’s not what a monopoly is. Controlling the behavior of hundreds of competing products is a monopoly.

You have to manually enable the play store on all of those devices. It’s why they’re so niche and only made by Chinese companies.

It’s not in any way a limitation of the OS. It’s a business decision that is using their market position as the only source of most Android apps in order to control what manufacturers are able to make and sell.

And again, your core concept isn’t just flawed. It completely lacks understanding of what antitrust is. You can make decisions that only affect your own hardware. You cannot claim to be open and use that “openness” to make yourself the standard, then use that market position to pick winners and losers between your “partners” using that product, especially when you’re also one of them. That’s anticompetitive. Google wants all the benefits of being “open” while completely dictating the entire market.

The play store is their monopoly that they abuse. There’s a refresh rate requirement to distribute your device with the play store.

Otherwise, the user has to go to a Google website page from the device, sign into a Google account, and copy paste serial information of the device in order to be allowed to install the store. That’s not something normal customers can do, and it massively impeded the growth of the Android reader space.

One example (of many) where their requirements have directly impacted the growth of a market is refresh rate. Android ereaders are excellent devices, but because of Google’s arbitrary limitations, devices until recently (when the technology they impeded with their monopoly developed far enough to meet that restriction) were forced to require users to jump through multiple extremely convoluted hoops to enable the play store.

This made them almost entirely inaccessible to normal end users and almost certainly played a huge role in the availability of options. That’s textbook anticompetitive.

It’s not the only restriction, just the first to come to mind.

That’s incorrect. There are multiple requirements, both hardware and software, to be able to ship with the play store. That’s the monopoly they’re abusing, and that’s what Epic is suing for.

Legally, yes. Dictating the rules for software on your own hardware is entirely legal, and extremely common.

Using your market position to dictate a cabal of other manufacturers’ rules on their hardware is anticompetitive. They’re using their market dominance with the play store to mandate a variety of hardware decisions and software decisions.

Because of their market dominance. That’s what antitrust laws are about.

The fact that it’s not just their own hardware completely changes the legal arguments in play.