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Yes. And it's very hard to copy your way into greatness, or gamify your way into greatness if the core product is weak. You can get one hit wonders, but people
by mathattack 11y ago
Yes. And it's very hard to copy your way into greatness, or gamify your way into greatness if the core product is weak. You can get one hit wonders, but people eventually resent the experience.
In a sense I see parallels with old AOL. They were still making money off the landline accounts sold to our parents, and did some copying here and there, but very little new greatness while they lived off the cash cow.
- chipotle_coyote 11y agoWhile this is a bit of a side point, I think the "AOL makes its money off people who haven't ever cancelled dial-up" meme is a little unfair to the company. They do make some money that way, and the ethics of doing that are (to be charitable) dubious, but after their separation from Time-Warner they executed a mostly successful pivot into advertising technology and content. You may not love the Huffington Post, TechCrunch or Engadget, and you've probably never even heard of "AOL Platforms," but when Verizon paid nearly four and a half billion dollars for AOL last year it wasn't about getting access to the coveted dial-up market. A better comparison might, perhaps ironically, be Yahoo. Not that Yahoo was ever as hated as Zynga, but after their usefulness as "the front page of the Internet" faded -- before the first dotcom boom went bust! -- Yahoo never really figured out what the hell to do with themselves, beyond continually insisting that they were an important media company. Somehow.
- mathattack 11y agoSure - I should have dated the AOL comments - Truer in 2010. And the parallel is still there. They did a successful pivot before selling again, but never re-achieved greatness.