What grudges do you hold against tech/software companies and why?

[Commodus]

1 hour ago, WikiForce said:

I also hate how Nvidia is promoting gimmicky stuff like Real Time Ray Tracing which makes no sense for little unnoticeable difference in graphics at the cost of huge performance impact.

Oh, it'll be noticeable in games -- it's just that the current hardware isn't powerful enough to fulfill the potential of ray tracing.  Think of it like the old GeForce 256 (the first mainstream GPU with hardware transformation and lighting acceleration)... the technology is absolutely important, but you'll only really appreciate it a generation or two later, when the hardware is fast enough and the games can take full advantage of it.

[cesh me inside b0z]

Apple; shit

Beats; shit

Sony; shit

AMD; shit

Intel; shit

Nvidia; shit

3DFX; shit

Microsoft; shit

Nintendo; shit

 

[DailyProcrastinator]

22 hours ago, dizmo said:

Yeah, that's why I ditched Ryzen entirely and moved back to Intel; RAM compability. I can throw whatever RAM I want into an Intel system, and it just works. Ryzen is (was?) picky. It shouldn't be. The fact that it was recommended you search for specific sticks, and of those specific sticks you had to get ones with specific brands of memory chips? Simply unacceptable. The warranty process with MSI was also annoying, so they lost marks there as well.

Yeah I was fortunate and still owned my i7-6700k system, so for a while I only used that system and my Ryzen system sat unused. In my waiting process I got an i7-8700k as well.

 

Memory compatibility was a major issue, I had to run at stock speeds, for X370 motherboards you had to legit buy RAM that was on your motherboards on the QVL list if you wanted to even attempt to run past 2133MHz. With bios updates on my X470 motherboard this became a problem of the past. I had "old" (from skylake) Corsair Vengeance LED RAM that if I even attempted to run at 2400MHz on my X370 it would crash the system. On my X470 the RAM easily ran at its rated speed of 3000MHz and I was able to OC my R7 1700 to 3.9GHz stable. 

[TempestCatto]

3 hours ago, F77 said:

Apple; shit

Beats; shit

Sony; shit

AMD; shit

Intel; shit

Nvidia; shit

3DFX; shit

Microsoft; shit

Nintendo; shit

 

Hotel; Trivago

[Vacras]

Deutsche Telekom AG.

They once tried to introduce a limit on data for regular contacts in homes and nearly managed to get through with it, because 100 GBs are enough. This was a few years back and now with Netflix and co and 4K streaming I don’t want to know how the situation would be here if they got it through.
They are pretty much the reason for Germany lacking behind when it comes to internet speeds because they pushed for Vectoring via copper cables while the rest of the world was upgrading to fiber. 
 

Even today when they lay down fiber they have the right to be the only provider on their owned runs and only offer 16 Mbit/s Download rates for like 50€ because no other isp can use the fiber cables for at least 3 years.

I’ve held a grudge against them since the days they tried to introduce limits on data and called them “Drosselkom” (Throttelkom in English) ever since.

 

[Ashleyyyy]

microsoft and privacy. enough said lol. 

[Vishera]

On 1/8/2020 at 11:27 PM, Anomnomnomaly said:

I kinda heavily lean towards AMD  GPU's...

Well,I have a grudge against AMD,

In April 2016 around the launch of Polaris and the Crimson Relive AMD released the most broken drivers in history:

Constant driver crashes and green screen of death,a problem that AMD have NEVER FIXED and 4 YEARS have passed since.

Then:

https://www.pcinvasion.com/r9-380-black-screen-issues-amds-persistent-unsolved-bug/

 

Now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pboDbxogSw4

 

Same old driver issues and problems with new ones as an added bonus.

[dizmo]

2 hours ago, JM21 said:

Yeah I was fortunate and still owned my i7-6700k system, so for a while I only used that system and my Ryzen system sat unused. In my waiting process I got an i7-8700k as well.

 

Memory compatibility was a major issue, I had to run at stock speeds, for X370 motherboards you had to legit buy RAM that was on your motherboards on the QVL list if you wanted to even attempt to run past 2133MHz. With bios updates on my X470 motherboard this became a problem of the past. I had "old" (from skylake) Corsair Vengeance LED RAM that if I even attempted to run at 2400MHz on my X370 it would crash the system. On my X470 the RAM easily ran at its rated speed of 3000MHz and I was able to OC my R7 1700 to 3.9GHz stable. 

Yeah I've heard that the newer stuff is pretty good, but I don't think I'd bother with Ryzen again until the 4000 series. And, with them being behind Intel this generation, it'll likely be a few years before I bother with them at all.

[DailyProcrastinator]

3 hours ago, dizmo said:

Yeah I've heard that the newer stuff is pretty good, but I don't think I'd bother with Ryzen again until the 4000 series. And, with them being behind Intel this generation, it'll likely be a few years before I bother with them at all.

That's fair. I'm on the upgrade curve now, I don't know that I'd replace the R7 3800x I just got though, don't really need anything better.

[NoMansLand]

EA: Command & Conquer 4. That is all.

[dizmo]

43 minutes ago, JM21 said:

That's fair. I'm on the upgrade curve now, I don't know that I'd replace the R7 3800x I just got though, don't really need anything better.

Yeah, not much reason to swap that out for sure! I'm going to be going with a 9700k for my Cyberpunk 2077 build.

[mrbunnylamakins]

E-Waste and seeing a lot of people I know having to by New TV every two years because of the Back LEDs going out. Environmentalist are always saying we are destroying the Earth and using up all it's resources. Yet I heard we are really not using up the resources but they are getting spread out more. By now we know the TV manufactures know their LEDs in the back going out 1-2-3-4-5 years So why not make them easier to replace. But we all know they want us to buy the latest Models every other year. 

A television (19" color): 1975 price was $294.95 Would you buy a tv for $1,410.10 if you know it would last 20 + years ?? I would. They should have at least a trade in offer for older models. Like Amazon does for it Tablets.

[kaiju_wars]

On 1/11/2020 at 3:33 PM, Kisai said:

Read more than one sentence please. Pick 4 stores anywhere in the US or Canada, and try to find the same product in them.

Just for lols, sure.

I live in the middle of nowhere North Dakota, about an hour outside of Minot, I'll use them as an example.

Let's say I want to buy Splatoon 2 on Switch.  That's a product.

I have these options here, and it's better, cause I have more than four options:

• Walmart
• Target
• Kmart 
• GameStop
• Rock 30 Games
• Best Buy

Nationwide in the US, there's Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.  Sure, T-Mobile and Sprint aren't as big as the other two, but T-Mobile is making decent moves to grow.

Plus with pre-paid cell service, sure they run off of the big four's towers.  But we have Tracfone, Net 10, Straight Talk, Cricket, and Metro PCS as the big ones.

 

Using my example from games earlier, we have Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony.  They're the big three with consoles.  Even if Nintendo likes to pretend they don't compete with the other two, they do.  The Switch has passed up lifetime sales for the Xbox One.  It shows that there's competition and enough room for more than two options (especially considering where the Wii U was).

 

It's okay that there's more than two options.  It's rarer, sure.  But it does happen.  

 

 

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, kaiju_wars said:

Just for lols, sure.

I live in the middle of nowhere North Dakota, about an hour outside of Minot, I'll use them as an example.

Let's say I want to buy Splatoon 2 on Switch.  That's a product.

 

 

Splatoon is not in competition with another game type unless you count other FPS games on Switch only. Since Splatoon is only available on Switch, it's only available on ONE device, and since it's available as a digital download only on Nintendo's service, availability is not restricted by retail shelf space. Either it's legal to sell in the country, or it's not available at all. All you've done is proven the point. Nearly all Nintendo first-party games are only available on the Switch, and there is no third party store from which to buy them.

 

The point I was making that you also missed was that the market only supports two options. A third option can very well exist, but it will never be competitive, and typically doesn't survive a market cycle. 

 

I know you want to go "but Sony...", but take a look at the actual sales figures.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/276768/global-unit-sales-of-video-game-consoles/

 

Sony and Nintendo are the two options, and Xbox is carrying third place except when Nintendo switches release cycles.

IF you include all gaming devices, well:

https://www.wepc.com/news/video-game-statistics/

Smartphones are now the #1 market. So assuming the breakdown of "Console"(Switch/PS4/XboxOne) and "PC"(Mac/PC), Smartphone(Android/iOS) is broken down by their actual device sales, the Windows PC would in fact be the #1 market, then the Playstation 4. Smartphone's do not have a very long lifecycle (18 months) compared to a PC (7 years) or console (avg 5 years)

 

Can you buy the same new game on all these devices? Absolutely not. In many cases the game developers only develop for two platforms and that's it. That's usually Xbox and Playstation if they're a console developer, or PC and Playstation if they're a PC/Console developer. Sometimes you see "very popular" games on both the PC and all the game consoles, but you never see it on everything, and the number of games that are available on PC and Console and can crossplay can be counted on one hand.

 

[kaiju_wars]

4 minutes ago, Kisai said:

 

Splatoon is not in competition with another game type unless you count other FPS games on Switch only. Since Splatoon is only available on Switch, it's only available on ONE device, and since it's available as a digital download only on Nintendo's service, availability is not restricted by retail shelf space. Either it's legal to sell in the country, or it's not available at all. All you've done is proven the point. Nearly all Nintendo first-party games are only available on the Switch, and there is no third party store from which to buy them.

 

The point I was making that you also missed was that the market only supports two options. A third option can very well exist, but it will never be competitive, and typically doesn't survive a market cycle. 

 

I know you want to go "but Sony...", but take a look at the actual sales figures.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/276768/global-unit-sales-of-video-game-consoles/

 

Sony and Nintendo are the two options, and Xbox is carrying third place except when Nintendo switches release cycles.

IF you include all gaming devices, well:

https://www.wepc.com/news/video-game-statistics/

Smartphones are now the #1 market. So assuming the breakdown of "Console"(Switch/PS4/XboxOne) and "PC"(Mac/PC), Smartphone(Android/iOS) is broken down by their actual device sales, the Windows PC would in fact be the #1 market, then the Playstation 4. Smartphone's do not have a very long lifecycle (18 months) compared to a PC (7 years) or console (avg 5 years)

 

Can you buy the same new game on all these devices? Absolutely not. In many cases the game developers only develop for two platforms and that's it. That's usually Xbox and Playstation if they're a console developer, or PC and Playstation if they're a PC/Console developer. Sometimes you see "very popular" games on both the PC and all the game consoles, but you never see it on everything, and the number of games that are available on PC and Console and can crossplay can be counted on one hand.

 

You asked for a product from four different stores.  I supplied a product from (more) than four different stores.  I didn't prove the point, because you didn't have any other qualifications for this hypothetical product.  Just a product that can be bought from four different stores.  But if it's a device that needs competition with another device, since we're adding qualifications after the fact, replace Splatoon 2 with Switch, or PS4, or Xbox One.

 

Now I have supplied this product and it doesn't support your point, so you're shuffling the goal posts and arguing semantics to say, "nuh-uh".

Also, again, it's also rarer, but saying you never see a game released on all platforms is also a false statement.  Witcher 3, Doom 2016, and Wolfenstein 2 are great examples.  Again, rarer, I'll give you that. 

 

As for your Microsoft argument saying how a third competitor doesn't typically survive a cycle.  I'd consider Microsoft a viable third option, at least in NA.  Especially considering they've survived three cycles and going on into their fourth.  Which, for the gaming industry, is pretty rare outside of Microsoft and Sony for the console race.

[RonnieOP]

On 1/11/2020 at 8:59 PM, Anomnomnomaly said:

 

There isn't a company on this planet that isn't a few steps away from going out of business... all it takes are some shitty decisions, some shitty products... kill of your userbase, fail to adapt to a changing market... and you'll just be another statistic with your IP bought out and stripped for the profit making parts whilst the consumers are thrown away and screwed over again and again. There isn't a company that has ever existed that is too big to fail... so your misguided belief that it wouldn't happen is... well... misguided at best.

 

It's interesting that you bring up 20 different beers from 20 different breweries... do you actually know 'who owns' all of those breweries?  The probability of it being one or two companies is high... very, very high. Stores have deals and agreements in place to stock from certain suppliers, the bigger the franchise the bigger the deal and the more likely it is to consolidate it's buying into fewer places.

 

This is an example... it's know as 'the illusion of choice'  this is just a basic example regarding food... you could easily create one for games publishers that own 90% of all game studios... the same applies to movie studios... Disney owns Marvel, Pixar, Fox, Lucasfilm, ESPN. ABC.. and subsidiaries of some of those companies are Sky, Hulu, Star, Touchstone, Hyperion... the list goes on and on.

 

 

 

I'll tell you what... go back to that store take pics of those 20 beers from 20 different companies and we'll see how valid that argument is. 

Dont get me wrong im not claiming a company is immune to last forever.

 

But that doesnt mean you should be worried about such huge companies going away and you losing your assets. Google is huge. They could go away. But what are the chances anytime soon? Not likely. You wouldnt tell people to not have a gmail because the risk of it being erased is high.

 

And i do have a shit load of breweries in my city. That bottle their own beer and distribute it. Some only in the city, some only in the state, some across the country. They are not owned by the big three. 

 

Point is the market will allow more then just 2 options. You dont have to be available around the entire world to be in the market. 

 

Replace beer with banks. Theres a shit load of banks that the market allows. Much more then two. Credit csrd companies. Theres quite a few of them as well.

 

 

[RonnieOP]

On 1/11/2020 at 11:45 PM, Kisai said:

 

There's only three beer companies in the US. Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors and Pabst. Anything else you see on the shelf is either produced by them or is a craft brew that likely only exists in your city or state. I don't drink beer so I have no idea, and don't really care what's popular or not. 

 

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-11-brewers-make-over-90-of-all-us-beer-2015-07-27?page=2

 

 

 

Not convincing me the market supports more than two beer manufacturers. There may be 11 according to that news article, but Anheuser-Busch InBev is 45% of the beer market.

 

Sorry, you have no idea what you're even talking about. VMNO's are not separate carriers. There is Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. That's it. Chances are only two of those even serve the same market. For example US Cellular owns practically nothing but the empty-middle of the US. That's why you can't get US Cellular service everywhere. Alaska is GCI and AT&T. Verizon acts as VMNO in Alaska. VMNO's allow carriers to operate in each other's market's which would previously be "roaming" back in 2003 when there were more than 5 carriers. Nextel and the former AT&T Wireless no longer exist, and Sprint will no longer exist once that merger with T-mobile goes through. All those prepaid VMNO's buy minutes/data wholesale from T-Mobile or Sprint. That means if Sprint has crappy coverage in your area, then all VMNO's that use Sprint will.

 

As I've said the market supports only two options. The logistics of existing as the third option is expensive.  

 

These are local, but just to prove the point again:

If you go down the beverage Aisle in Walmart, everything is owned by Coke, Pepsi or Nestle, and Nestle does not sell carbonated beverages, it sells only water, but so does Coke and Pepsi. That's the only thing in the beverage Aisle that has a third option. Coke or Pepsi own the bottling companies. The occasional regional brand like Jones Cola (Seattle) or New York Seltzer (California) only exist on the shelf for a short period of time and then they disappear for months. That's because the store doesn't see any reason to purchase these products because they don't move huge volumes, and they get no marketing incentives to even carry them. Even talking to the stores that carry them, they often say that they carry them all at the same time because of the distributor made it available. Coke for example right now has a bunch of "craft soda"'s which consist of Barq's Rootbeer, BC Raspberry, Mexicoke, and Georgia Peach. These have been available for the last 6 months, but the stores that carry them have not restocked them once. I'm pretty sure 7-11 and London Drugs goes through the same distributor because they carry these other soda's (like Jones and NY Seltzer) at the same time, and they also disappear at the same time, which tells me that they're probably going through Coca-Cola's logistics channel.

 

The problem with comparing food with software is that food has an expiry. So stores are not going to carry 6000 different beverages and packaged foods from around the world if people locally aren't buying them, because they will incur a loss.

 

With digital software, there is no marketing, there is no duplication costs, all it costs to digitally distribute a DVD sized game is 5GB of data and an insignificant amount of energy. The cost per GB of data realistically is only about 1 cent. Especially in high volumes. So It costs Valve or Epic about 5 cents to sell a game in data, and costs them about 3% of the retail price to the card processor. So games that cost less than $1, are likely a loss, but not a significant loss.

 

If you're a game developer and you want to sell your game, you're not going to setup your own logistics. For you, it makes the most sense to put your game on every market (eg GOG, Itch.io, Steam, Epic) but if you have to make it exclusive, you're leaving that money from those other markets on the table, and everyone who can not be arsed to download Epic's launcher will just pirate the game anyway. They're not going to wait for the exclusivity to end.

 

You still have not provided any factual evidence that the market only allows two options.

 

In fact you provided links to prove other wise.

 

Also your factually wrong about att and verizon being the only two options. Idk why you neglect tmobile and sprint. They might not be great in every area. But neither is att and verizon. Sprint has 55 million customers. Tmobile has 73 million. And then if you want to count their prepaid partners like boost then the numbers go higher. 

 

But just because something isnt viable in your area doesnt mean it isnt in other areas. 

 

Theres a shit load more then 2 banks the market allows. Wells fargo, bank of america, jp morgan, citigroup, td bank, suntrust, bb&t. Etc. Are they in every single area of the world? No. But that doesnt not mean they arent an option in the open market.

 

You bring up coke and pepsi. Those are not the only two options depending on your area they might now even bottle the same drinks.

 

In the south and parts of the north east. Cheerwine (who bought rc cola) bottles alot of popular sodas like a&w root beer, country time lemonade, nehi sodas, etc. They are a viable option in alot of markets.

 

 

I cant understand how you could possible truly believe the market only allows two options when its easily provable thats not the case.

 

Gas companies. Exxon, BP, Valvoline, Shell, Marathon, etc.

 

Insurance companies. Allstate, progressive, liberty mutual, esurance, etc.

 

 

 

[Luna.exe]

On 1/8/2020 at 7:19 PM, Anomnomnomaly said:

I've got the Aorus B450 Pro with the dual bios that keeps falling over to the back for no reason what so ever... and it cannot run the Corsair Vengeance 3200mhz ram at 3200mhz at all. I have to run it at 3000mhz and of course everytime the bios falls over it resets everything back to defaults. It will probably be the last gigabyte board I ever buy for a long time.

i used to have the b450-m dsh3 with a ryzen 3 2200g and 16gb ddr4 3000mhz ram my board said it could over clock it doesent at all it wouldent let me use my full ram speed it ran it at 2100mhz if i tried tried to oc my cpu i had to use the shitty gigabyte app that dont save settings or apply them upon a reboot or it would just blue screen even if the oc was done right i used to like gigabyte untill i got that shit board not a fan of amd anymore ethier they can shove there cpus up where the sun dont shine lol so many problems with that config finaly traded it off the other day for intel products (cpu and mobo). intel has allways been so good for me

[Husky]

Samsung, their poor software support pushed me away from their smartphones. I used to have a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and I loved it until about 2 years in when I realized how painfully slow it got and the fact that it only received like 2 Android version software updates. The amount of bloatware and refusal to provide me with a non carrier-branded ROM didn't help either - and at the time custom ROM support wasn't so great. So now I am sitting with an iPhone 7 Plus that I got at launch and it has been updated constantly and has not slowed down at all.

 

It also didn't help that I went through through at least 5 of their TVs after they all failed for unknown reasons, 2 washing machines that failed, and a Gear smartwatch that had failed after I washed my hands and got like 2 drops of water on it even though it was water resistant and claimed to be able to withstand being submerged.

 

Also, HP. After one of their laptops literally CAUGHT FIRE with sparks flying out of the charging port (original genuine OEM charger and battery). I had to throw the laptop out of the house and waited for it to burn. There was nothing I could do except stand there and laugh.

[Mira Yurizaki]

35 minutes ago, NZgamer said:

Linux is getting better and better as the days go past, even Linus himself has said it's more viable than ever. You should give it a try again

Assuming you're using a version that has active support.

 

I had fun trying to update a Lubuntu install I had that managed to get two system versions away. Since there was nothing important on it anyway, I said "screw it" and installed a new version on top of it.

[DailyProcrastinator]

18 hours ago, dizmo said:

Yeah, not much reason to swap that out for sure! I'm going to be going with a 9700k for my Cyberpunk 2077 build.

Actually I just remember how sour I was when I found out that 8th gen Intel CPU's were not compatible on Z170/270 motherboards. I wasn't surprised, but I wasn't happy.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Assuming you're using a version that has active support.

 

I had fun trying to update a Lubuntu install I had that managed to get two system versions away. Since there was nothing important on it anyway, I said "screw it" and installed a new version on top of it.

It is impossible to "update" Linux from one major version to another, or even a different flavor, unless you're an absolute masochist who enjoys doing things hard. FreeBSD is much much easier to do major version updates, but even it has it's own special flavor of ports/packages hell.

 

Windows and OSX are the only OS's that fully allow upgrading from one version to the next. Heck, you can actually upgrade from 1.0 to 10 if you feel like installing every minor version in between. There is absolutely no point to doing this, but Microsoft put in a lot of effort into not breaking their previous software. Unlike present day OS's. Apple is a lot more willing to rip off the bandaid, Microsoft is going to need to pull 32-bit support eventually. Out of necessity, since developers continue to release 32-bit-only software out of sheer incompetence. And expect Microsoft to do this in the same way 16-bit support on 32-bit OS's are enabled, some obscure "additional software" feature to turn on, so that developers have their arm twisted.

 

Linux, no such luck. Ironicly, Android has better major version upgradeablilty than Linux server distros.

[Oopy Doopy]

On 1/8/2020 at 8:19 PM, Anomnomnomaly said:

I've got the Aorus B450 Pro with the dual bios that keeps falling over to the back for no reason what so ever... and it cannot run the Corsair Vengeance 3200mhz ram at 3200mhz at all. I have to run it at 3000mhz and of course everytime the bios falls over it resets everything back to defaults. It will probably be the last gigabyte board I ever buy for a long time.

I bought the Aorus X370 Gaming K7 and a Ryzen 1700 back when those were newer.  Grabbed that board because I wanted it to be a nice high end board to last me through the life of the AM4 platform.  It was my first Gigabyte board.  I'd heard the stories about Gigabyte bios issues, but figured they were exaggerated or isolated.  Besides, tech outlets loved this board and highly recommended it.

 

Well, out of the box, I had front panel audio fuzz/crackling issues...and surprise, everyone had these issues, it wasn't a case problem.  This is on a board that specifically advertised having separate rear and front audio with separate chips.  Audio was meant to be a real feature on this board haha.  Oh well, I planned on getting an external dac/amp soon anyway, I could live with this flaw, as hilariously ridiculous as it is to have said issue on a $200+ board.

 

My Corsair Vengeance 3200 MHz RAM didn't work at XMP ever over the years I used the board, but first gen Ryzen wasn't a smooth experience on any platform so I can't fault them too much for that.

 

What I can fault them for is the bios updates that caused severe voltage issues, stopped working with my M.2 drive (to the point of corrupting it once, luckily it was recoverable), and having a generally awful bios to navigate (though this is subjective).  One of the bios updates even bricked my first bios.  Luckily you could boot into the backup bios, flip the switch, then run the bios update to fix it (I got this fix from someone in the gigabyte forums, the support dude flat out suggested RMAing the board...).

 

The m.2 drive was the final nail in the coffin.  0 of the bios updates to support third gen ryzen worked with my m.2 drive on that board.  So despite Gigabyte having extremely tempting hardware and features along with very competitive prices on their x570 boards, I went with an AsRock board for my 3700x upgrade and the experience has been a night and day difference.  Having a board where things actually work as you'd expect is nice.

 

So, yeah, I'll never buy a Gigabyte motherboard again, unless there's a very clear improvement to w/e processes are involved with rolling out bios updates internally.

 

I still think I can trust Gigabyte with any hardware that doesn't have advanced user configuration or complex software, like GPUs, monitors, etc.  They make great hardware (the board itself was nice, and my gigabyte rtx 2080 is a great card), but the software leaves a whole lot to be desired.

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, RonnieOP said:

You still have not provided any factual evidence that the market only allows two options.

I keep doing so, and you just ignore them and move the goal posts.

 

Quote

In fact you provided links to prove other wise.

 

Also your factually wrong about att and verizon being the only two options. Idk why you neglect tmobile and sprint. They might not be great in every area. But neither is att and verizon. Sprint has 55 million customers. Tmobile has 73 million. And then if you want to count their prepaid partners like boost then the numbers go higher. 

AT&T tried to buy T-mobile, T-mobile bought Sprint. They can not grow by getting new subscribers, so they have to buy their competitors. There are only two major carriers in the US, that is Verizon and AT&T, and if you knew anything about cellular tech, you'd understand why this is, and why it's true on a market to market basis.

 

T-Mobile, Seattle

https://www.cellmapper.net/map?MCC=310&MNC=260&type=LTE&latitude=47.56416804877128&longitude=-122.36097324118982&zoom=11&showTowers=true&showTowerLabels=true&clusterEnabled=true&tilesEnabled=true&showOrphans=false&showNoFrequencyOnly=false&showFrequencyOnly=false&showBandwidthOnly=false&DateFilterType=None&showHex=false&showVerifiedOnly=false&showUnverifiedOnly=false&showLTECAOnly=false&showENDCOnly=false&showBand=0&showSectorColours=true

 

AT&T Mobility, Seattle

https://www.cellmapper.net/map?MCC=310&MNC=410&type=LTE&latitude=47.56416804877128&longitude=-122.36097324118982&zoom=11&showTowers=true&showTowerLabels=true&clusterEnabled=true&tilesEnabled=true&showOrphans=false&showNoFrequencyOnly=false&showFrequencyOnly=false&showBandwidthOnly=false&DateFilterType=None&showHex=false&showVerifiedOnly=false&showUnverifiedOnly=false&showLTECAOnly=false&showENDCOnly=false&showBand=0&showSectorColours=true

 

Sprint, Seattle

https://www.cellmapper.net/map?MCC=310&MNC=120&type=LTE&latitude=47.56416804877128&longitude=-122.36097324118982&zoom=11&showTowers=true&showTowerLabels=true&clusterEnabled=true&tilesEnabled=true&showOrphans=false&showNoFrequencyOnly=false&showFrequencyOnly=false&showBandwidthOnly=false&DateFilterType=None&showHex=false&showVerifiedOnly=false&showUnverifiedOnly=false&showLTECAOnly=false&showENDCOnly=false&showBand=0&showSectorColours=true

 

Verizon, Seattle:

https://www.cellmapper.net/map?MCC=311&MNC=480&type=LTE&latitude=47.56416804877128&longitude=-122.36097324118982&zoom=11&showTowers=true&showTowerLabels=true&clusterEnabled=true&tilesEnabled=true&showOrphans=false&showNoFrequencyOnly=false&showFrequencyOnly=false&showBandwidthOnly=false&DateFilterType=None&showHex=false&showVerifiedOnly=false&showUnverifiedOnly=false&showLTECAOnly=false&showENDCOnly=false&showBand=0&showSectorColours=true

 

Seattle ONLY has these carriers. This is a major population center.

 

Now look at Anchorage:

AT&T:

https://www.cellmapper.net/map?MCC=310&MNC=410&type=LTE&latitude=61.20585712442099&longitude=-149.90080390020486&zoom=10.18343254612229&showTowers=true&showTowerLabels=true&clusterEnabled=true&tilesEnabled=true&showOrphans=false&showNoFrequencyOnly=false&showFrequencyOnly=false&showBandwidthOnly=false&DateFilterType=None&showHex=false&showVerifiedOnly=false&showUnverifiedOnly=false&showLTECAOnly=false&showENDCOnly=false&showBand=0&showSectorColours=true

 

Verizon (LTE only):

https://www.cellmapper.net/map?MCC=311&MNC=480&type=LTE&latitude=61.20585712442099&longitude=-149.90080390020486&zoom=10.18343254612229&showTowers=true&showTowerLabels=true&clusterEnabled=true&tilesEnabled=true&showOrphans=false&showNoFrequencyOnly=false&showFrequencyOnly=false&showBandwidthOnly=false&DateFilterType=None&showHex=false&showVerifiedOnly=false&showUnverifiedOnly=false&showLTECAOnly=false&showENDCOnly=false&showBand=0&showSectorColours=true

 

GCI Wireless:

https://www.cellmapper.net/map?MCC=311&MNC=370&type=LTE&latitude=61.20585712442099&longitude=-149.90080390020486&zoom=10.18343254612229&showTowers=true&showTowerLabels=true&clusterEnabled=true&tilesEnabled=true&showOrphans=false&showNoFrequencyOnly=false&showFrequencyOnly=false&showBandwidthOnly=false&DateFilterType=None&showHex=false&showVerifiedOnly=false&showUnverifiedOnly=false&showLTECAOnly=false&showENDCOnly=false&showBand=0&showSectorColours=true

 

Notice, No T-Mobile or Sprint.

 

Hence, the US market only supports TWO carriers.

 

And because this deserves pointing out:

https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/25-charts-spectrum-ownership-united-states

 

Sprint has a lot of Spectrum, Verizon does not.

 

And 600Mhz 5G deployments?

 

There we go again with only two options. Given there are other frequency bands, those lower frequency bands are more valuable.

 

This is the PCS band (1900Mhz)

Closer to 4 there but those are legacy assets. The original Analog spectrum will probably be more than 50% AT&T but I'm not sure if this spectrum is in the research data since none of the slides are labeled.

 

Quote

 

But just because something isnt viable in your area doesnt mean it isnt in other areas. 

 

Theres a shit load more then 2 banks the market allows. Wells fargo, bank of america, jp morgan, citigroup, td bank, suntrust, bb&t. Etc. Are they in every single area of the world? No. But that doesnt not mean they arent an option in the open market.

US Banking is extremely fragmented, if you move state, you likely have to close your existing accounts.

 

https://www.bankrate.com/banking/most-popular-bank-in-each-state/

 

Now, go through each of those and see which ones are available in every state, let alone city. Alaska happens to have Wells Fargo, Hawaii has none of the megabanks. So no US bank has a presence (and for this case merely having an ATM does not count) in all 50 states.

 

Quote

You bring up coke and pepsi. Those are not the only two options depending on your area they might now even bottle the same drinks.

 

In the south and parts of the north east. Cheerwine (who bought rc cola) bottles alot of popular sodas like a&w root beer, country time lemonade, nehi sodas, etc. They are a viable option in alot of markets.

You're moving the goalposts. Go look at who the bottlers are for the beverages in your supermarket. You'll find that they are almost entirely bottled by Coke or Pepsi. Different smaller brands may be bottled by both Coke or Pepsi. Did you know Kureig (yes the coffee maker) owns Dr.Pepper right now? Did you know that they own RC Cola in the US only. Cott is the company that produces most of the store-brands in Canada and the US and bottles most of the other soda's you see that aren't independent.

 

You can keep hitting your head against the wall here. If someone asks for a Coke or a Pepsi, they don't want the generic store brand.

 

Quote

 

I cant understand how you could possible truly believe the market only allows two options when its easily provable thats not the case.

You seem to think that "exactly two" applies to everything which is not what I stated. I stated the market only supports two options. Very large cities support having more than one grocery store, but most small cities have no more than two, and because they're smaller cities, they also do not support having a large varierty of foods.  In a large city you can have one store support a lot more variety. For example where I live, the international Aisles are almost entirely South Asia (India) and East Asia (Japanese, Chinese and Korean) varieties of rice and seasons. If I go to the Asian grocery store (which is in the same mall) there's brands that I've never heard of, let alone can read the packaging. Yet who owns these two stores? The same company. In fact in Western Canada, most grocery-stores are owned by Loblaws (Real Canadian Superstore, T&T, NoName brands, and Presidents Choice brands) or Jim Pattison group (Save-on, PriceSmart). In Eastern Canada, Loblaws uses it's own brand name, and the other one is Sobeys (who entered Western Canada by buying Safeway)

 

Still the market only supports two options. When they demolished the Save-on, they replaced it with a smaller PriceSmart. When Sobeys bought Safeway, they just straight up closed it.

 

Quote

Gas companies. Exxon, BP, Valvoline, Shell, Marathon, etc.

All gas stations get their fuel from the same refinery. So this is really a lack of choice. In the lower mainland of BC, all fuel comes from the Burnaby Chevron refinery. When the pipeline is down, it comes from from the US. Only two options.

 

 

Quote

Insurance companies. Allstate, progressive, liberty mutual, esurance, etc.

 

 

 

Take a really close look at what states those insurance companies operate in. You'll probably be surprised and discover that few of them overlap. Yes, I see those ads all the time, but those are all on NYC based news channels. Seattle based channels do not.

 

Now the question is, which insurance companies does the market actually support? Unlike a lot of the above, insurance is even more specific per market than banking, as more than banks typically offer this service. 

 

The page this comes from says it's from 2016 for Life insurance.

 

 

This is for Health care insurance.

 

Now between the two , you can see the same pattern where there are two options that dwarf most of the others in the data.

 

It's probably not that fair to compare apples and oranges over and over though. 

 

Smaller cities, do not support more than two options, for anything, for physical merchandise. For virtual services (that includes insurance) there doesn't actually have to be a physical location to get the insurance from, unlike trying to buy sodas or oranges.

 

At a national level, there's rarely a third option that is available in all 50 states, because not every market supports more than the two largest options, because only the two largest options are willing to have a presence.

 

To go back to the mobile carriers. There are large swaths of the US, and Canada with ZERO coverage. It's not economically viable to put towers where people do not live. The grass and cattle are not going to make cell calls, and the occasional car or train that goes by doesn't justify the maintenance of towers in the middle of Montana. 

 

Inside the US, yes, sure some markets are large enough to maybe support a third option, but in general, everything comes back to two options everyone knows and cares about, and everything else, new or existing fails to get any traction with new customers because they simply lack the marketing clout the biggest options are. 

 

[wasab]

4 hours ago, Kisai said:

It is impossible to "update" Linux from one major version to another, or even a different flavor, unless you're an absolute masochist who enjoys doing things hard

So untrue. stop spreading misinformation for godsake. Seriously, i see wild claims from you that contradict my entire lifetime user experiences with Unix and unix like OSes.