@adiz @lanodan @hj @mangeurdenuage

> if you fill up an order book for a product, in this case, aircraft, then you also cuck your competition out of the ability to also expand or buy that product.

This is one of Apple's favorite techniques. Gorilla Glass starts rolling off the production lines and Apple buys all of it: every other phone manufacturer is stuck with plastic for years. They did the same thing with high-DPI LCDs and then started advertising "retina" displays. Sometimes instead of just agreeing to buy the entire output of a company for a year or two, they just buy the company. Their entire business model is "fancier than all of the other ones" and if you buy up all of the fancy thing for long enough that other manufacturers can't get a product into the store for at least a year or two, then you maintain (albeit somewhat artificially) your image of being a year or two ahead of everyone else.

> you can always offload assets in the future to recoup expenditure in acquisition which prevented your competition from being able to source means of production,

Well, yeah, it's just another means of cornering a market that is of dubious value, though. And while that may work for hashing hardware, it doesn't work for money you spend on user acquisition: you can't sell ads that you've bought. So user acquisition cost has to somehow relate to the value of the user acquired.

> have no idea how this works in the IT world or with AI,

It does work with consumer electronics, and, except that there's no physical scarcity so the thing you try to lock in is users, it's the dominant strategy for VC tech firms and large tech companies ("IT" has a somewhat more specific meaning), which is why everyone's talking about user acquisition cost.