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Agree - Staltz seems to assume that nobody will disrupt GOOG-FB-AMZN. It does feel like it's getting harder to disrupt over time, because the incumbents are eve
by dustingetz 9y ago
Agree - Staltz seems to assume that nobody will disrupt GOOG-FB-AMZN. It does feel like it's getting harder to disrupt over time, because the incumbents are ever more powerful. But technology's lever also becomes more powerful over time.
Companies' have achilles heels. They are built into the way they think in the era when it was started, when it was agile and fit in the mind of one person, before it got big and cumbersome, impossible to steer, profit-magnetized and impossible to even think longer term than a quarter. This business cycle is inherent to our laws and culture, it happens to all companies eventually.
Startups 20 years from now will be built by today's toddlers who pinch-zoom magazines and "Alexa, play Spice Girls" an empty room. The incumbent generation can't imagine what the next generation will bring, almost definitionally. But they will have disruptive ideas too. They will probably look stupid to us old people and we won't see it coming until it's too late.
Open-data-web is a good today-generation example. There are chickens and eggs to be solved, maybe the economics are impossible. Or maybe just nobody figured out the path yet. There were a hundred crypto currencies before bitcoin that went nowhere. But if someone figures out a strategic path that gets there, we know that person won't be Facebook, because open data will wreck Facebook's core business.
- nobleach 9y agoThe key concern here is the collusion from ISPs. If they were to truly sell prioritized traffic to GOOG-FB-AMZN at a hefty discount, then it stands to reason most businesses will stop wasting their time trying to build things that don't leverage those avenues. Even as it stands today, how many "SEO gurus" are optimizing for Bing? If you want to be seen, you optimize for Google. So while I agree that all companies have an Achilles heel, this one is fairly sturdy for the foreseeable future.
- CreepGin 9y agoGood point. I generally share the same view. On one hand, there were so many corporate consolidations in the past few years. On the other hand, people's discontent probably also led to the rise of Blockchain tech.