This bums me out. I always liked the idea of two companies in complementary spaces working together toward something and maybe merging some day far in the future.
> Instead we’re trying to make each other trivial.
Which is about as good a definition of "technological progress" as you are going to find. I for one am happy at how economically trivial housing, transport and food production have become over the last thousand years.
Why just two companies? The article describes one company with a chokehold in one spot of the vertical and many other companies producing commodity complements.
But there are lots of verticals near each other, so there can be many people at one level working with commodities at another level, who likewise believe that the people above/below them are also generating a commodity complement.
What we end up with instead is a global economy of people generating value and building things that make lives better, which I think is awesome! Generating value is the most legitimate reason to have people pay you - you don't have to extract rent from a monopoly position to be a viable business.
This doesn't bum me out at all. Looking at the headline examples given, they all seem to move tech in a better direction. If more of the trivial things are commoditized, then more effort goes into competing on the things that matter.
Example headlines FTA: IBM Spends Millions to Develop Open Source Software; Netscape Open Sources Their Web Browser; Transmeta Hires Linus, Pays Him To Hack on Linux
Instead we’re trying to make each other trivial.