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"de facto platform, it’s hard to control and even harder to dislodge" There is a Finnish service called irc-galleria.net. It's a service that was created to le
by vlehto 11y ago
"de facto platform, it’s hard to control and even harder to dislodge"
There is a Finnish service called irc-galleria.net. It's a service that was created to let irc users to share pictures of themselves to other irc users. It got really big in Finland. They even had big screen in center of Helsinki to show new pictures uploaded to the service. They had this paid feature which let you keep a list of friends in there. Everybody talked about irc-galleria stalking.
Then Facebook came. The major difference was that facebook let you make friends for free. Year later nobody remembers irc-galleria.
Dislodging a platform is easier than ever. It's enough to make better or cheaper product, then just get lucky. Previously you had to also take distribution and marketing into account and then get lucky.
- jacquesm 11y agoDislodging a many-billion-euro incumbent is a lot harder than dislodging a funny irc pic sharing site.
- vlehto 11y agoFunny pic sharing vs. funny digital yearbook. Irc-galleria was many million euro behemoth in the context of Finland. Facebook at the time could not spend even 10k to tackle irc-galleria. Tackling many billion-euro incumbent is probably harder than tackling many million-euro incumbent. But it's probably like twice as hard, not 1000 times harder. And it has happened in less favorable situations before. Look up Toyota.
- 7952 11y agoI don't think these big platforms will ever be dislodged exactly, just made irrelevant. Photo sharing used to be difficult enough that it could act as the basis for an entire product category. Now it has been commoditized sufficiently that it can be just added to any product with relative ease. Maybe one day it will be possible to add Google style search technology to any product with ease. At that point the opportunity is to have specialist search as an add-on to other products.
- vlehto 11y agoI'm trying to imagine here what it would take to beat Google in it's own game. The most frustrating searches I've had with google are always about some thing I have seen before, but can't find again. It would be relatively easy to optimize for this if you can have some kind of bookmark app and search history available. So that search would prioritize stuff I have bookmarked or found previously. It would be probably be valuable for the search engine to know what products I have bookmarked. The catch here is that I'm not going to trust google with that data. So essentially delicious with very powerful search as by product.