BT was only successful if you take a very narrow view of success. They dragged their heels on rolling out ADSL to maximise short-term profits from ISDN which has had a hugely negative effect on the country.

Government spent decades figuring out how to regulate it and even today OpenReach is far than ideal.

If this is the case, why are many other EU postal services still state-owned (e.g. Ireland, Poland, Cyprus, Greece)? The UK left the EU 5 years ago yet it’s still being used as cover for UK political decisions.

We live in a world where, for certain topics, people believe whatever narrative suits them at the time. Facts seem to not matter too much. Brexit is one of those topics.

On a similar note, I’ve always liked the idea of being able to mark functions as pure (for some reasonable definition of pure).

The principle of reducing state changes and side-effects feels a good one.

For what it's worth, I was experimenting with this idea for Python (in an almost completely vibe-coded fashion) here: https://github.com/jlmcgraw/pure-function-decorators

Whether it's of any actual utility is debatable

That telephone monopoly was privatised - and later dragged their heels on rolling out broadband because ISDN was so profitable, causing untold damage to the UK tech economy as the country fell behind on connectivity.

It’s a great parable of badly-managed state-run monopoly vs badly-managed privatised monopoly.

If the Tory government hadn’t reserved the market for cable TV exclusively for two US companies, NTL and Telewest, BT would have rolled out fibre to the home in 1990.

I don’t think I blame BT for not wanting to invest in a market it was barred from making a profit in. This is the result of heavy handed local regulation strangling a national incumbent for the sake of foreign interests.

At any point other competitors could have made the same investment but didn’t want to either until relatively recently.

Well one of these things happened and the other one was a hypothetical? It seems very wishful thinking to assume it just would've happen if the politics of the 70s had some how limped into the 80s

I’m beginning to think my reluctance to shamelessly copy has held me back in life. It’s clearly more widespread than I naively assumed (and I say that without casting judgment).

I’m convinced a major reason Windows Phone failed is because Google didn’t support it for self-serving reasons. It rarely gets mentioned but no YouTube or Google Maps apps is a big deal and a major barrier to adoption. The tech giants don’t want competition.

I'm convinced FirefoxOS would've stuck around a lot longer if WhatsApp had an app for it. Maybe it wouldn't have made waves in the US, but in other countries it was a great alternative to other low-cost options, except the messenger everybody used for everything didn't work on it.

If nothing else, it’s clear communication and shows they have seen the online discourse. We’ll see if they follow through.

There’s a certain logic to it too: they’ll be far more interested in upselling to existing Canva subscribers than selling Canva to the far smaller Affinity userbase.

My understanding is that these sorts of sites allow companies to pay to boost positive reviews to de-emphasise negative reviews, not remove bad reviews.

Still somewhat shady.

Yes and no. Isn’t there an argument that Gmail and Outlook.com (combined with Microsoft 365/Exchange Online), while superficially interoperable, have enough market share that their actions make running other mail providers very difficult in practice?

> Isn’t there an argument that Gmail and Outlook.com (combined with Microsoft 365/Exchange Online), while superficially interoperable, have enough market share that their actions make running other mail providers very difficult in practice?

Yes, there is an argument to be made for that. I personally agree with that viewpoint. But that doesn’t mean arguing against it is “mental gymnastics”. It’s possible for reasonable people to disagree about things.

Indeed. I hope the EU revisits this soon.