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What are some examples of this phenomenon in action?
by yeldarb 10y ago
What are some examples of this phenomenon in action?
- ronilan 10y agoObvious. There was, during the dot-com bubble, a startup that said "our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" when all their customers really wanted was to buy the top position on their search engine like one would do with an AOL keywords. You never heard about this example cause generalization just killed them. /s
- icebraining 10y agoThat's a mission, not a problem. They had a general mission, but they were solving very specific problems with Search. Wave, on the other hand, is a good example of a product made to solve a general problem.
- wpietri 10y agoA classic example is Webvan. The basic idea was that ecommerce was going to kill store-based commerce. The founder was talked out of selling absolutely everything and focused in on groceries. They spent a billion dollars building out warehouses, buying trucks, etc, etc. They solved the general problem of delivering groceries. However, nobody buys a general solution. Each person picks a specific solution to their specific problems. And most people a) already had ways to get groceries they were happy enough with, and b) WebVan never was particularly great for anything, just adequate for a bunch of things. WebVan would have known this if they had started trying to solve the problem for, say, people living on a single block. But because they scaled up while solving a generalized problem, they were screwed. This is in sharp contrast to Amazon, which started out with book sales, nailed that, and has spent 20 years gradually expanding to other products, markets, and approaches.
- Nition 10y agoThere was another older service called HomeGrocer that was doing quite well... until WebVan bought them out and converted them to WebVan tech. From Wikipedia: > In September 2000, stockholders approved a $1.2B all stock buyout by the cash-rich competitor Webvan of the much larger HomeGrocer.com. HomeGrocer was rebranded to Webvan, the management team fired and the technology and processes converted to Webvan. The Webvan technology did not work very well and their execution was poor. Most telling, the eight different HomeGrocer facilities converted to Webvan saw overnight sales declines of one-third, then over 50% within two weeks and never recovered. Formerly profitable HomeGrocer facilities quickly ended up with significant losses. Studies of what happened after the merger were not kind to the original Webvan management who spent over $500M before going bankrupt less than a year later.