Comment by PoignardAzur

> Makes sense. But what's to stop _anyone_ else from getting into that same business? And doing it better? Maybe you create an initial advantage, but for how long? Game consoles come to mind.

You have to keep in mind that the natural outcome of capitalism is to create a forsaken hellscape of competition where individual companies struggle to make margins good enough to survive.

In this case, the truism is to commoditize your complement. Companies have an incentive to push as much capitalism as they can into things they don't make money on, and keep the capitalism away from their main products as long as they can.

So eg Google don't want to commoditize maps, because they're happy having a monopoly on mapping services. Google's competitors want to commoditize maps, because by doing so they undercut Google and make their own cloud service / phone OS / office suite / other all-encompassing orwellian service more competitive.