4 ms·

I agree with some of your points, but I think "avoid competition / competitors' markets" is a fallacy and bad advice. Successful companies succeed in the face

I agree with some of your points, but I think "avoid competition / competitors' markets" is a fallacy and bad advice. Successful companies succeed in the face of competition, and capitalize on some opportunity, which could be a technology, a market shift, a business model, or a partnership. You can often turn this "seizing a (unique) opportunity" truism into a "looking where others didn't" story in hindsight, and start getting excited about real "off the map" innovations, as if there's something inherently good about that, business-wise. In Google's case they simply came up with a better business model, though their tech strength helped. Altavista was a search company. Google didn't succeed by not stepping on Altavista's toes in the "portal market" (which I'm sure is entirely distinct from the web search market), they just built a better search business.

nostrademons 16y ago
Successful companies succeed by picking their competition carefully. You want to compete with firms that either don't know or don't care about your customers' use case, so that you can bring more resources to bear on this particular problem than they can. Altavista was a search company, but in the late 90s, they didn't particularly care about search. If they did, they could easily have copied PageRank (which was published, and the patent is owned by Stanford anyway) and search ads (which were done by Overture before Google) and done as well as Google did. They didn't realize that it was a threat until Google started making serious inroads in the early 2000s, though, and by then it was too late. (Interestingly, both of the founders of Altavista ended up working at Google.)