4 ms·

Counterpoint: uber, but yes I hear you.

• rdl 11y ago
  Uber's moving down from Uber Black to UberX, Pool, etc., but wasn't really an "incumbent" (they are young), and it was fundamentally cheaper-than-limo even from the beginning (by letting you pay by the ride vs. per time block). This is more about big established companies. It's not really even technical; it's protecting their revenue, employee/management structures, etc. built around high-end from low end. It would be interesting to find organizations which did historically build super high end stuff which moved down into consumer. Both successful and unsuccessful examples. iRobot MIGHT be an example -- moved down from DARPA and Packbot to the Roomba; but they weren't really established, and those were different sectors. Apple has sort of moved downmarket from computers (and, expensive ones) to cheaper ones to phones. But those were mostly adjacent sectors, not in their core product. I'd love some counter examples where it was within the same product, an established company (say, 10+ years selling the old product), and moved in at the low end.
  • arscan 11y ago
    Tesla is on that trajectory. But the plan was always to go for the lower market eventually and use the higher end markets to incubate the technology, so I don't know if it counts. I think you just need some serious institutional discipline to make it work. Same deal with SpaceX.
    • rdl 11y ago
      Someone on Twitter suggested Nokia; the entire cellphone market definitely moved from high-cost to high-volume. Nokia was amazingly strong right before smartphones. Even through the smartphone days, they got costs down so the delivered cost of a Nokia phone in Africa was less than Apple pays to ship an iPhone 6S to me from China...
      • josh2600 11y ago
        FWIW, minus the Burning Platform memo, it's entirely possible that we could still be looking at Nokia as a large player on the world stage.