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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Treo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Treo was way before Andriod. First mover advantage is rarely an advantage at all. M
by wtvanhest 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Treo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Treo was way before Andriod.
First mover advantage is rarely an advantage at all. My guess is that google sees this as optionality and testing to get things right like insurance etc. in anticipation of self driving cars. At the very least it allows them to extract more value from Uber when Google finally have self driving cars ready to sell them.
I really don't see how Uber is worth more than a few billion in a few years. Google is playing the long game hard and I think they are going to win here.
- vegabook 10y agoMakes sense. But they've shown no staying power in any of their other long term initiatives. Google Fibre (halving staff). Self driving car (looking for investors/partners). Robotics (disinvesting). Google+ (firing the boss after 2 years). Glass (debacle buried under the carpet). Motorola (flipped for a few billion pronto and now struggling). Shopping (trounced by Amazon). Cloud? (for second place, Microsoft Azure is ripping them a new one). Music/Video premium services? (spare me as my eyes roll towards anybody else). And they're now miraculously going to do Uber? Which requires enormous long term financial commitment? With the above record? Unlikely. This company knows how to do ads, and that's it. It fails at everything else.
- euyyn 10y ago> they've shown no staying power in any of their other long term initiatives You actually can't find even one? :)
- dannylandau 10y agoFair points above, but what about Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, among others. Those are solid successes!
- estefan 10y ago> First mover advantage is rarely an advantage at all Genuine question (not a snarky comment as it might sound), but can you link to any research that indicates it's 'rarely' and advantage? I've been reading books recently that emphasise the importance of being the first to market with something innovative. Your brand then gets associated with the product/service ("hoover", "Uber", "google") even when referring to the general category. Second-mover advantages do exist, but is there any research on whether it's more advantageous than being a first mover who iterates? I know it can happen, but in this case I'd rather be Uber with an established brand & mindshare rather than Google playing catch-up.
- euyyn 10y agoThose books aren't really mentioning Google Search as an example, right? It didn't have first-mover advantage.
- flukus 10y agoIt kind of did, AFAIK it was the first functional search engine. Everything else at the time was pretty terrible.
- euyyn 10y agoYeah, no true Scotsman ends up losing first-mover advantage.
- flukus 10y agoIt's not no true scotsman though. Google search was very different to what came before it. The only similarity was the UI.
- euyyn 10y agoThat's nonsense. The only two differentiators were the minimalistic UI (at a time when load speed of a web page was noticeable) and the better quality of the results. There were a bunch search engines already, all of them with a search box where you typed stuff and got a list of results.