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Amazon, Facebook and Google can all be beaten

202 points by monsieurpng 9y ago

notaboutdave 9y ago
The problem never was that they can't be beaten. The problem is that they buy all the competition. Great if you're being bought, not so much if you're a part of society.
- adventured 9y ago
  Not everyone can be bought. Walmart is booming massively online right now. They've got $15 billion per year in net income to play with (7x that of Amazon), nearly half a trillion in sales, hilariously more cash flow than Amazon, as well as having 3x the retail sales of Amazon. And with the current version of Amazon on the scene, Walmart is unleashed to behave competitively in a way they haven't been able to in two decades (while Amazon is in the exact opposite position due to emotion / fear of their potential; Amazon will increasingly be watched for anti-competitive abuses). As it stands right now, Amazon has a very serious problem brewing with Walmart's online business. It's the only serious competitive threat Amazon has seen in the last 10-15 years. Instead of seeing contracting sales, Walmart's overall retail business is actually holding its ground; and at that scale, it's an extraordinary thing; their same store sales growth has been positive for 13 straight quarters, even as Amazon has grown vastly larger in the last 3-5 years. Amazon is taking share from other retailers and they're failing to strike a meaningful blow to their biggest retail threat.
  - snarf21 9y ago
    Which is why them buying Jet.com just to get Marc Lore was a very reasonable bet. He hates Amazon as well and now has the resources to fight them. Look at all the acquisitions they have made into brands in the last year. It is always great to have three competitors in a space but two is better than one (like Comcast in most markets).
- jasode 9y ago
  >The problem is that they buy all the competition. But they don't buy all the competition. At least 3 forces prevent that: 1) they have to recognize that the target company _is_ competition. For example, Larry and Sergei tried to sell their young Google company to Excite for $1 million. Excite wasn't interested. They also tried to sell to Yahoo. Yahoo wasn't interested either. (Yahoo became interested much later when Terry Semel was the CEO but by then Google was already worth more than $5 billion.) If you can't see the small company as a threat, you ignore them even if they prostrate themselves before you begging you to buy them. Excite and Yahoo both couldn't see that the little upstart Google was going to make them irrelevant. 2) The competition has to willingly say "yes" to being acquired. Some say "no". A famous example of that is Facebook saying "no" to Yahoo's offer of $1 billion in 2006. Later in 2010, Microsoft and Steve Ballmer also wanted to buy Facebook for $24 billion and again, Mark Z refused. Bill Gates himself refused Ross Perot's early offer of $7 million to buy Microsoft. 3) the competition becomes too expensive to buy. Ebay toyed with the idea of buying Airbnb but the home-lodging company got way too expensive way too fast for Ebay to execute a deal Acquiring _all_ the competition requires identification of threats (that don't look like threats on the surface) and cooperation from the targeted companies and available funds. You don't get always get that combination and that's why Google and Facebook are not subsidiaries of Yahoo.
spunker540 9y ago
While I appreciate the optimism of the post, I think it doesn't matter so much if Google gets beaten when it comes to "C team priorities". Google search is still unbeatable and still gives Google a giant advantage over startups in many areas besides search. To steal an example from the EU: flight price aggregation.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  I don't think Google is unbeatable at Search. I think Amazon's Alexa is a real threat. They don't need to be better than Google as long as they're can be good enough and convenient. Though it's also worth noting that what make Google money is commercial search, which is a niche you could theoretically win in one vertical at a time.
  - jacksmith21006 9y ago
    Alexa is awful for search as in answering questions and when you include mobile it has a tiny share compared to Siri and the Google Assistant. But Google keeps adding at a rate it will be very difficult to compete. It is a moving target. The latest is Google Lens. Basically adding a new type of image search that will be tough to compete with as the resources and algorithms necessary will be tough to match.
    - Eridrus 9y ago
      I think Siri is a good example of how vulnerable Google is. As of this year it's powered by Google, but until then it was powered by Bing and Google is paying billions of dollars a year for the privilege of being Siri's backend.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
Here's an example of how to beat Facebook: Make a social network for children. Facebook has too much political inertia to be trusted with such a thing. Then, as those children grow, continue to come out with services useful to them. They have to be new enough and cool enough that the kids will switch to the new service as they get older. If you can manage to make your service useful throughout all stages of a person's life, starting with childhood, then you can eventually displace Facebook by refusing to sell. It won't be easy, and it would take a decade. But it's doable. You may question the ethics. That's valid. Unfortunately, ethical questions tend to go out the window: Every time a technology becomes possible, it seems to be inevitable. Bitcoin is a perfect example. Either you build this, or someone else might. And if you care about the ethics, this is an opportunity to build something less draconian than Facebook from first principles.
- kristianov 9y ago
  I see an interesting parallel in this side of the Great Fire Wall. You know Tencent has its WeChat which nowadays requires identification and cell phone number to use due to Gov. policies. This discourages WeChat's usage in teenagers and children. To cover that front, Tencent actually uses its other IM product, QQ, and caters more for the children's needs.
- mcintyre1994 9y ago
  I think Facebook already did this with Instagram, as evidenced by it being their only property who’s Snapchat clone worked out. I’m sure that can be displaced, and I’m not sure cloning Snapchat counts as coming out with new and cool services, but I think Facebook are already keenly aware of this threat.
ctdonath 9y ago
Over 4 decades I've watched many unbeatable high-tech juggernauts disappear practically overnight. These will be no different, including the relentless claims of "but it's different this time!" for each one.
- ardit33 9y ago
  I don’t know. MSFT and Apple have been around for 35+ years and still going strong. If well managed, large companies stick around for a long time. Can’t see why FB and GOOG won’t be around for at least another 30 years. Sure, there is SUN, and Sillicon Graphics as an example, but they were badly managed and put all their eggs into one expensive basket and got disrupted. The only way large companies become truly irrevelant is through: 1) Bad management 2) Ground shifting / seismic shift on the ecosystem or tech. (Think Kodak). FB has been very proactive in acquiring new trendy companies and in retrospect Instagram’s acquisition was a genius move. (I remember how much talk was at the time at the 1b price for a company with no revenue). Google has been proactive by doing active research, and amazon by doing all kinds of things. Yahoo and Twitter are classically badly managed companies and while yahoo got sold to irrevelance, I think Twitter is the next one to be truly disrupted.
  - tehlike 9y ago
    Google has recently diversified into many other sub-bets. How about FB? What are they diversifying in?
    - elsewhen 9y ago
      VR, Video, Messaging
      - tehlike 9y ago
        Video is part of its social focus, so is messaging. VR... i don't know about that.
  - zdw 9y ago
noncoml 9y ago
And then what? There was a time that we thought MS could not be beaten. It did. And now we have Google and FB. Are they any better? Why do you think the ones who will beat FB and Google will be better? If anything, I expect them to be worst, as SV tech geeks are being replaced by power and money seeking individuals.
- tehlike 9y ago
  MS is still kicking.
  - esturk 9y ago
    The parent post didn't say MS is dead just that it was beaten and indeed it was. MS was thought to be unbeatable as the "consumer facing OS". But mobile OSes came about from an entirely new market (this being mobile) that supplanted the desktop in consumer's daily lives.
    - junkscience2017 9y ago
      Who beat Microsoft in what? Microsoft's primary business is Windows. Who has beaten Windows? Obviously new businesses have been born that Microsoft would love to own...but so far, there has still been no successful assault on the main business
      - jacksmith21006 9y ago
        Google in AI, browsers, streaming video, search, mobile and a number of other things.
      - esturk 9y ago
        Who: Apple and Google What: Enter a new Market that 'was' supplanting an existing market I'm not sure what you meant by business here. Windows is a product from MS which is segmented by different markets. There's a business need and a consumer facing need. It got beat in the latter. It also didn't move fast enough to reach the mobile market so it got beat in speed as well. The consumer facing product has been assaulted. Consumers are buying PCs, and by extension Windows, less. MS was impacted and Ballmer resigned. That was the whole pivot to the Cloud by Satya. All this is common knowledge.
lubujackson 9y ago
I think the most surprising vulnerability for Google is web search. Google has been pushing away from web search for years now, with moves like AMP, vertical searches and quick answers that keep you on their domain. If you look at the mission statement for their search team it is now something like "answer your questions" - which is great 90% of the time, but what no longer exists (with most people not realizing) is a good general search engine for the WEB, meaning the collection of websites out there. There is no longer a sense of serendipity or of finding a cool new website, and maybe finding web pages on the web is just a nostagic thing with no real benefit, but there's no doubt that Google has moved away from that as real objective. The reality is that the web has become overwhelmed by listicles and minimum pages that go one inch past Google's definition of spam, but otherwise muck up the web. It would be amazing for a search engine to sift past all that cruft and low-effort material to find actually interesting and unique content. In a way, simply by not being Google is already an advantage because everyone is catering to Google. If you use a different standard you can easily get different results - it's just a matter if those would be useful for anyone? Everyone mostly wants to see the "right" answer and Google has conditioned us to expect it.
- tspike 9y ago
  If someone nailed discussion search, I'd have no use for Google for 90% of my searching. As it is, most of my searches are a series of: site:<reddit/ycombinator/stackoverflow/tripadvisor/random niche forum.com> "something someone interested in the same question/topic would say" .. all in an attempt to filter over-commercialized bullshit. There's an opportunity here for a startup to capture an audience hungry for real information and leverage them into becoming the next hub for over-commercialized bullshit.
  - dvddgld 9y ago
    I use the same kind of search for most of my searching. Does anyone have any tips to add to this? e.g specific sites for any particular demands, or any other tricks
    - fosco 9y ago
tabeth 9y ago
Whether or not they can be beaten is one thing. The other thing is whether or not they'll fail to buy their competitor.
junkscience2017 9y ago
a frontal assault on any of these will prove futile...ask Snap, ask Jet.com (who wisely got acquired before Amazon could be bothered to vaporize then) they're still rising...but even if they stopped rising, they have amassed the financial resources of nations, and they have the credit to borrow much more. Apple in particular is basically a G8 nation...their cash pile may literally span centuries and they may actually need to hedge against the expiration of the governments whose currency they hold. unlike oil, we will not "run out" of data...these companies will eventually dwarf anything from the industrial age if you want to "beat" them, (what does that even mean?) do what Elon Musk is doing and create new markets and industries
- njarboe 9y ago
  And off-earth colonies.
- manigandham 9y ago
  Jet.com was basically engineered to be sold, never was a serious contender.
ImSkeptical 9y ago
This article doesn't inspire much faith in me as a reader. The first example of a start up beating a tech giant is Snap competing with Facebook. Snap did well for a while, but things are looking grim last I heard. Likewise, the author, in the comments, suggests that the big three priorities of Amazon are AWS, Groceries, and Prime. Seems to be forgetting the two largest categories of Amazon's business - foreign and domestic retail markets. Omissions like that make question the rigor of the analysis over all. Speaking of being able to focus on three things, why? Why that number? Isn't Amazon, for example, competing in Cloud computing, e Books, retail, tablets, content, groceries, home assistants, advertising, and probably a few other major categories? Likewise Microsoft has game consoles, office, cloud offerings, Windows, search, and again, other areas. I think the thesis, that you can compete with tech giants, is true, but the analysis of the article is brief and poor. The reason you can compete with tech giants is because they are looking for a way to grow their gigantic companies and so they will forgo relatively small markets even if they are promising. I would not bet on your startup to beat Amazon in making budget tablets, or Apple in making premium ones, but if you can identify a niche with a customer that needs to be served you can outcompete major companies because they won't be willing to focus on that niche. For example, you can't make a better budget or premium tablet, but maybe you make a tablet that floats to serve fishermen. It's a hit, so you work on connecting it to their fish finders, now you're building custom sonar sensors because your brand has a reputation and you want to add features to the tablet. Before you know it, you have a self-driving boat, and you're entering the shipping market automating the work formerly done by seamen. With a big presence in shipping you use your connections in China to start up your own retail website, and now you can compete with Amazon directly because you can arrange cheaper shipping of goods from China to US marketplaces. I also do think there is some validity to the article's point that you'll be competing against the C team. I'd add on to it that as a startup you'll be more agile. If you're competing against a tech giant they'll be held up by a lot of bureaucracy that won't afflict you. You can match their dev team for competence, move faster, and compete in spaces where they won't want to follow. That's how you won against big companies, not because they are magically limited to paying attention to three areas.
- dingaling 9y ago
  > forgetting the two largest categories of Amazon's business - foreign and domestic retail markets I don't buy much on Amazon nowadays but on about 50% of times when I do go there to buy a non-book product it has been reclassified as "Prime-only" Normally that passes after a week or so but it does show that Amazon is prepared to sacrifice spontaneous retail sales in order to promote Prime.
joshvm 9y ago
Amazon is in a weird place right now. In the recent past, Amazon was the place to get stuff online - cheaper than most places and Prime shipping was a big win. I don't think they're going anywhere, but there's still an awful lot of stuff you can't buy on there, or is difficult to find. Now some departments are getting more like Etsy - a Shenzhen marketplace. This is good, because there's a lot of random stuff you can get that you don't need to import. It's also bad because it's virtually impossible to know what you should buy if you don't know the brand reputation (and that matters to you). Take 'usb cable' for example, have a look: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=usb+cable https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias... Brands include Rephoenix, Luoriz, Ugreen, Syncwire, RAVPower, Rankie, Benestellar, Onson, Jecent, Emmabin, Brightsnow, Maxteck, choetech, Volutz, Kinps, the list goes on. I got to page 3 before I gave up. What about headphones? Mpow, OneOdio, BienSound, Alihen, Sephia, ZIYE, Sadon, OMORC, etc. I'm genuinely curious as to when sellers decided that they must have a brand name for every product, and to hell with the meaning. It's like they all read those "how to sell on Amazon by importing" tutorials. Even though deep down I know that they're probably just as good as anything you can buy on the high street, the sheer volume of random brands is really off-putting to me for some reason. A bigger problem is that you can miss stuff in the noise - e.g. if you didn't know that Anker have a good reputation, could you tell the difference from any of the other names in that list? Seller churn is also high, so it's not like you can rely on reviews either - that product might be gone in a month. On a brighter note it really highlights how much you're being ripped off when you buy from a 'name brand' company that's just rebadging stuff from China.
- justboxing 9y ago
  > the sheer volume of random brands is really off-putting to me for some reason Your example of 'usb cable' is a very good one for highlighting this problem. You are seeing so many brands because of an army of "Amazon Associates Sellers" / FBA - Fullfilled by Amazon Sellers ( I like to refer to them as scam artists) who identify various electronic gadgets, household items, and other things that are in demand, that are light (so cheap to ship) and that are available in bulk in Alibaba or Alibaba Express. They simply slap on their brand logo / name on packaging, pay a few select reviewers to do a 5-star review on amazon and make a whole bunch of sale. So in essence, the chances are that these 10+ brands you are seeing for 'usb cable' are all sourcing the same exact 'Made in China' product from the same factory in China through Alibaba. Do a search for 'Strawberry corer' and you'll see what I mean :) This is a very real problem that amazon has been very slow to resolve. There are even Fiverr gigs that do the product research for cheap. Source: https://www.fiverr.com/gigs/amazon-fba https://www.fiverr.com/gigs/amazon-fba
natural219 9y ago
I got so excited from the title. I also want Amazon, Facebook, and Google to be beaten. I am however not excited about just another hypergrowth-driven, capture-the-whole-market-or-die, walled garden, more-of-the-same traditional startup. I want the forms of these companies to die, and a patchwork economy of more medium-sized firms each providing a piece of the puzzle without trying to capture the whole thing. That's just me, though.
raspasov 9y ago
What about Apple? Does anyone think that they can be beaten? What makes Apple different from Google, Amazon & Facebook? Curious to hear what people think.
- chrisvalleybay 9y ago
  Paraphrasing from the book The Four by Scott Galloway: Apple is a company that has positioned itself as a luxury brand. Apple is about sex and signalling. Carrying an Apple phone signals more status than if you were to carry an Android phone, since it is more expensive, just like with other luxury items. But in addition to attaining this status, it has done something that many other luxury brands have not: low production costs in addition to premium pricing. Now, no other techbrand is a luxury brand, which puts Apple in its own league. Either it's going to take a very long time to unseat Apple, or they need to miss a big new market, that they didn't see coming. Now, most of us believe AR/VR and AI to be the next market, if they aren't able to get to market fast enough with products that we have come to expect from Apple, this can be an issue. I recommend reading the book by Scott Galloway, it is insightful.
  - ghostcluster 9y ago
    He has some insights, but also injects a lot of naive and grating political signaling into analysis, which makes him sometimes hard to take seriously.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - jbreckmckye 9y ago
      I have never read _The Four_, but stopped by to make a quick complaint: can we please retire the verb "signalling" in political discourse? As far as I can tell all "political signalling" means is "I cannot believe what you profess to believe, therefore I assume that you profess it merely to be trendy".
      - 9y ago
junkscience2017 9y ago
forget about Schumpterian disruption, strap in for some real dystopia. Think about Apple with a standing army to protect it's assets. Think about Google governoring cities. Think about Amazon buying the interstate system. Think about Facebook having a seat on the UN Security Council. At least one of the above will be true by 2040.
- ttoinou 9y ago
  But then there will be competition in "army to protect company assets", "company governed cities" "company owned interstate system" and "company UN security council" ! Good news :D
adamnemecek 9y ago
I can actually imagine a new search engine. The thing about google is that it’s not power user friendly. Give me some query language. And let me somehow search for things related to the swift language without getting results about the singer.
- homarp 9y ago
  Power users don't watch ads, as they have ad blockers.
  - adamnemecek 9y ago
    Make me pay then. Like by giving me more power, I'm reducing the expectations on the product. I dont want magic, I want power.
    - jabretti 9y ago
      If I'm going to pay for search it's better be a lot better than google. And google has a twenty year head start and a gazillion dollars and can rapidly implement any clever feature you might think of.
      - adamnemecek 9y ago
        Can they? They won’t touch the interface whatsoever. Also a lot of times I care only about a subset of the internet. Google won’t let me specify what subset.
        jjeaff 9y ago
        1. Ban eHow (and the few other sites like it. 2. Ban any site that shows different content to the Google bot vs the user. (looking at you Quora, with your login required to read, Pinterest...) 3. Ban all the myriad of sites that do nothing but list out every possible phone number or random words. AI should have no trouble detecting those. 4. Ban all the sites that do nothing but copy content wholesale from other sites. I thought they had a duplicate content penalty, but it doesn't seem to work. Do those simple things and you've just made Google search 10x better.
likelynew 9y ago
I think with many small countries outside US/Europe becoming developed, one needs a shopping site with wide variety of international products and minimal shipping rate.
myf01d 9y ago
Personally I wish Facebook to be destroyed, it's kind of a psychological cancer. I also guess Amazon can't be destroyed unless with a series of defeats within a very long period, it may be transformed into another Microsoft or IBM at worst but it won't be destroyed.
- QML 9y ago
  What’s wrong with Facebook? I personally don’t think of social networks as malevolent — in the end they’re just tools. The real issue in my opinion is the type of content that is peddled to me.
  - elsewhen 9y ago
    Facebook's engagement-maximizing algorithm determines what content gets shown to you, and the peculiarities of that algorithm indirectly inform content creators. many content creators experience the following: when they publish something thin/clickbaity they get a bunch of views, whereas when they publish something nuanced/complex they only get a few. this effect effectively establishes a race to the bottom.
    - Viliam1234 9y ago
      I am just a random Facebook user, and I already noticed the same effect on my wall: stupid things get liked and shared, anything of value is mostly ignored. It happened a few months ago when as a result of reading some online stories, I decided to delete everything I posted on my Facebook wall; but then I changed my decision to "everything, except for the few best (highest quality? best ratings? maybe a bit of both) things". So I spent a few hours deleting stuff from my wall, while paying attention to the quality and number of likes. And I noticed the pattern that I didn't actually notice before. I was already aware that I sometimes post smart content and sometimes stupid content, and that sometimes I get a lot of reactions and sometimes barely any. But only now I noticed how strongly are these things anticorrelated. It is almost always the stupid stuff that gets most reactions, and the smart stuff that remains ignored. Dozens and dozens of my old posts, always the same pattern. After seeing this, I am no longer motivated to spend any energy on my Facebook interaction. Once in a while I share an interesting article, but I don't bother posting a summary anymore; I already expect no one will care, if even someone will see it. And once in a while I share a family photo. And that's all.
guylepage3 9y ago
They definitely can be beaten but not for the reasons stated in this article. Network effects cannot be undone without a fundamental shift in their business models. Right now Facebook and Google make their money off advertising and tracking their users. Break the business model and incentivize a Network and a new Network can grow.
jv22222 9y ago
It's a bit arbitrary to say that a company is only good at three things. Also, the bad hiring A -> B -> C players only makes sense if the "three things" are all in the same business domain because then the A listers from the same domain are used up. But, when Google is doing things like Android, Self Driving Cars, Youtube, Glucose Sensing Contact Lenses etc. Each domain is different and interesting enough to attract top talent. (When we say Google, we mean Alphabet, right?) Amazon is such a wild thing and always iterating on new ideas (Alexa, AWS, Etc) I highly doubt they will be limited to "3" things. Also, Amazon have a great trick of commercializing all the services they create for themselves, which seems like it will just keep adding hedges and more surface area of revenue. Microsoft, still huge. Sure they didn't win search but they have so many other strings to their bow (Xbox, Surface, Windows, etc) Funny thing is, Microsoft didn't exactly own the search market and then "get beaten" by Google. Google just aced that from the get go and essentially created that market growth by making it possible to search the web so well. Slack is a great example of how that works. There were lots of players making team chat and the market was not so huge. Then along comes Slack and makes something that is a delight and useful for many people, so much so, that it creates a new outsized market that didn't quite exist in that way before. So, rather than "get beaten" I think the most likely scenario is that new players will continue to come along and create versions of "products that don't suck" and as a result markets that were once small will, all of a sudden, become huge. I also think blockchain, right now, is like the internet was in say, 1998, and there will be some huge companies emerging from that tech.
- krawut 9y ago
  > I also think blockchain, right now, is like the internet was in say, 1998, and there will be some huge companies emerging from that tech. Why do so many people seem to think this? As someone with a background in crypto, I just don't see the resemblance. Blockchains are useful for proof-of-work and Merkle Trees give you a way to compress many individual signatures, but those things are inherently made for distributed decision making and this comes with a lot of overhead. The exact opposite of what a corporation needs.
  - ttoinou 9y ago
mankash666 9y ago
The more relevant question is "can your startup succeed?" Google's C product is another big incumbent's A product. For your startup to succeed, you often times need to beat most other competitors, many of whom consider the product their A listing.
partycoder 9y ago
And that's why companies get acquired all the time. In fact, many startups are created with the purpose of being sold to larger companies.
DmitryOlshansky 9y ago
The biggest issue with a project under big tech giant is that they could afford to trash it at the moment notice. There is super low commitment on new projects (say <1% of work force), compared to a startup that is betting all money and talent it could get on a chance that there is an overlooked market for product X. 100% focus, staying far from a comfort zone and taking the risk is what (in a very few cases though) makes it work. Basically tech gaint doesn’t have to “burn the ships” and therefore has lower commitment, poor focus, has no sense of (get big or go home) urgency and eventually drops the idea before it bears fruit. It can offord to say “pass”, but doesn’t need to “bluf” and it doesn’t have the same risk.
- virgilp 9y ago
  On the contrary, my experience on the enterprise is the exact opposite: the new projects where the commitment is a high % of workforce are the biggest failures: the pressure to "deliver value" so overwhelming, that you can't "fail your way to success". You've got one shot to succeed. Do you know any startup who succeeded from the first shot? (and it gets worse - since you have a lot of "resources", you also can't move fast, because there's a lot of synchronization overhead: you can only employ a significant workforce once you know _very well_ what needs to be done; on new projects, that's never the case.)
lkrubner 9y ago
Standard Oil, AT&T and Microsoft can all be beaten -- just as soon as the government steps in and takes action against them. Capital tends to concentrate over time. It takes government action to break up monopolies. There are very few examples of monopolies fading away on their own.
Someone 9y ago
Rome could be beaten, too, but before that happened, a lot of incumbents failed, and Rome bought quite a few others before they became too powerful. And yes, there are multiple winners. Some nibbled at Rome’s borders, carving out a sizable chunk for themselves, some conquered Rome (often not with much long lasted gains for themselves). The big question is what made those who beat it winners. I would guess lucky timing is a huge factor there. That’s what anybody trying to take (parts of) those giants head on should be worried about.
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
"How did Snapchat beat Facebook to the youth market over the last few years? (Remember Poke?). How did Facebook beat Google in social media in the early 2000s? (Remember Orkut?) How did Google beat Yahoo and Microsoft in search?" 1. It wasn't Facebook who beat Google. It was Google who lost to Facebook. 2. It wasn't Google who beat Yahoo and Microsoft. It was Microsoft and Yahoo who lost to Google. 3. Lastly, Snapchat LOST to Facebook. I don't know where he even pulls this out of. Unlike his takeaway which is nonsense and will probably make you waste years trying to make something stupid happen, here's my takeaway--which is actually opposite of what he'saying--that's much more helpful: Don't try to fight against a giant in their own turf. As Snapchat, you will never beat Facebook in their own game, Social. As Google, you will never beat Facebook in their own game, Social (This goes both ways. There have been many rumors about Facebook entering search engine arena, but that will never work). Microsoft and Yahoo (A portal whose business model used to be opposite to Google's) can never beat Google in its own game. The lesson is, play your own game. Don't play into these VCs telling you it's ok to make these stupid attempts. In their eyes, you the founder is just a number. And even if so, this is a terrible advice because there are so many other ways you can win "against" google, facebook, amazon--You simply don't play against them. Google "beat" Microsoft by dominating their own category. Facebook "beat" Google by dominating their own category. And lastly, Snapchat couldn't "beat" Facebook because they decided to follow stupid advice like this guy gave and fight against Facebook instead of dominating its own category. It had potential at first to invent a differentiated category of its own but went off rails becoming just another social media app, which Facebook then swiftly copied.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Chrome came later and beat MS. The same with Google and mobile. Google just provided better solutions.
  - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
    To be precise there were two phases. Firefox came and beat MS IE first. Then a while later, Chrome came and beat Firefox. This is a completely different story though. First of all, Chrome. Chrome is not a startup. It's a product launched by Google, one of the richest tech companies in the world (and given away for free because they didn't care about directly making money from it). What REALLY happened was it nearly killed off Firefox which was way way poorly funded. So this is irrelevant to this discussion where the topic is about "startups". Second, let's talk about Firefox. Firefox didn't really "beat" IE because they didn't really make much money out of it. Firefox was a very special case. It wasn't some startup which went against MS. It was a result of Netscape losing to MS, and then deciding to open source it while they're going out of business. This is not exactly the best scenario when you're building a startup, and even if we're arguing based purely on product (and not whether the company actually managed to extract value out of it), again it's irrelevant to this current thread because Firefox is NOT a "startup". Lastly, if you're looking at this type of rare occasion and hoping your startup will work out that way, then go ahead and do so, I don't care. I'm just saying there are way better ways to "beat" Google, Facebook, and Amazon. And that's by NOT trying to beat them.
AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
Google search pretty much has turned into a glorified DNS lookup system. A good public DNS with search/blocking combined, may be self hosted for those interested in doing so, would go a long way to eat into Google Search use cases. Address/phone number lookup and website lookup for a company would probably cover 50%+ use of Google search. Huge opportunity to disrupt. I wanted Google to succeed, I believed in their vision and then 2016 happened, I saw YouTube go downhill in less than a month. If that is how they want to wield their power, for those political goals, then I want them reduced to likes of Yahoo. Thousands of engineer's work over past 20 years, hijacked by political hacks who inserted themselves in the decision making process of Google, a negative side effect of Google's involvement in 2016 election campaigns. Either Google unwinds that, or time to wind Google down.
cvaidya1986 9y ago
Anyone working on such startups? Secretly? :D

202 points by monsieurpng 9y ago

The problem never was that they can't be beaten. The problem is that they buy all the competition. Great if you're being bought, not so much if you're a part of society.

adventured 9y ago
Not everyone can be bought. Walmart is booming massively online right now. They've got $15 billion per year in net income to play with (7x that of Amazon), nearly half a trillion in sales, hilariously more cash flow than Amazon, as well as having 3x the retail sales of Amazon. And with the current version of Amazon on the scene, Walmart is unleashed to behave competitively in a way they haven't been able to in two decades (while Amazon is in the exact opposite position due to emotion / fear of their potential; Amazon will increasingly be watched for anti-competitive abuses). As it stands right now, Amazon has a very serious problem brewing with Walmart's online business. It's the only serious competitive threat Amazon has seen in the last 10-15 years. Instead of seeing contracting sales, Walmart's overall retail business is actually holding its ground; and at that scale, it's an extraordinary thing; their same store sales growth has been positive for 13 straight quarters, even as Amazon has grown vastly larger in the last 3-5 years. Amazon is taking share from other retailers and they're failing to strike a meaningful blow to their biggest retail threat.
- snarf21 9y ago
  Which is why them buying Jet.com just to get Marc Lore was a very reasonable bet. He hates Amazon as well and now has the resources to fight them. Look at all the acquisitions they have made into brands in the last year. It is always great to have three competitors in a space but two is better than one (like Comcast in most markets).
jasode 9y ago
>The problem is that they buy all the competition. But they don't buy all the competition. At least 3 forces prevent that: 1) they have to recognize that the target company _is_ competition. For example, Larry and Sergei tried to sell their young Google company to Excite for $1 million. Excite wasn't interested. They also tried to sell to Yahoo. Yahoo wasn't interested either. (Yahoo became interested much later when Terry Semel was the CEO but by then Google was already worth more than $5 billion.) If you can't see the small company as a threat, you ignore them even if they prostrate themselves before you begging you to buy them. Excite and Yahoo both couldn't see that the little upstart Google was going to make them irrelevant. 2) The competition has to willingly say "yes" to being acquired. Some say "no". A famous example of that is Facebook saying "no" to Yahoo's offer of $1 billion in 2006. Later in 2010, Microsoft and Steve Ballmer also wanted to buy Facebook for $24 billion and again, Mark Z refused. Bill Gates himself refused Ross Perot's early offer of $7 million to buy Microsoft. 3) the competition becomes too expensive to buy. Ebay toyed with the idea of buying Airbnb but the home-lodging company got way too expensive way too fast for Ebay to execute a deal Acquiring _all_ the competition requires identification of threats (that don't look like threats on the surface) and cooperation from the targeted companies and available funds. You don't get always get that combination and that's why Google and Facebook are not subsidiaries of Yahoo.

spunker540 9y ago

While I appreciate the optimism of the post, I think it doesn't matter so much if Google gets beaten when it comes to "C team priorities". Google search is still unbeatable and still gives Google a giant advantage over startups in many areas besides search. To steal an example from the EU: flight price aggregation.

Eridrus 9y ago
I don't think Google is unbeatable at Search. I think Amazon's Alexa is a real threat. They don't need to be better than Google as long as they're can be good enough and convenient. Though it's also worth noting that what make Google money is commercial search, which is a niche you could theoretically win in one vertical at a time.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Alexa is awful for search as in answering questions and when you include mobile it has a tiny share compared to Siri and the Google Assistant. But Google keeps adding at a rate it will be very difficult to compete. It is a moving target. The latest is Google Lens. Basically adding a new type of image search that will be tough to compete with as the resources and algorithms necessary will be tough to match.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    I think Siri is a good example of how vulnerable Google is. As of this year it's powered by Google, but until then it was powered by Bing and Google is paying billions of dollars a year for the privilege of being Siri's backend.

sillysaurus3 9y ago

Here's an example of how to beat Facebook: Make a social network for children. Facebook has too much political inertia to be trusted with such a thing. Then, as those children grow, continue to come out with services useful to them. They have to be new enough and cool enough that the kids will switch to the new service as they get older. If you can manage to make your service useful throughout all stages of a person's life, starting with childhood, then you can eventually displace Facebook by refusing to sell. It won't be easy, and it would take a decade. But it's doable. You may question the ethics. That's valid. Unfortunately, ethical questions tend to go out the window: Every time a technology becomes possible, it seems to be inevitable. Bitcoin is a perfect example. Either you build this, or someone else might. And if you care about the ethics, this is an opportunity to build something less draconian than Facebook from first principles.

kristianov 9y ago
I see an interesting parallel in this side of the Great Fire Wall. You know Tencent has its WeChat which nowadays requires identification and cell phone number to use due to Gov. policies. This discourages WeChat's usage in teenagers and children. To cover that front, Tencent actually uses its other IM product, QQ, and caters more for the children's needs.
mcintyre1994 9y ago
I think Facebook already did this with Instagram, as evidenced by it being their only property who’s Snapchat clone worked out. I’m sure that can be displaced, and I’m not sure cloning Snapchat counts as coming out with new and cool services, but I think Facebook are already keenly aware of this threat.

ctdonath 9y ago

Over 4 decades I've watched many unbeatable high-tech juggernauts disappear practically overnight. These will be no different, including the relentless claims of "but it's different this time!" for each one.

ardit33 9y ago
I don’t know. MSFT and Apple have been around for 35+ years and still going strong. If well managed, large companies stick around for a long time. Can’t see why FB and GOOG won’t be around for at least another 30 years. Sure, there is SUN, and Sillicon Graphics as an example, but they were badly managed and put all their eggs into one expensive basket and got disrupted. The only way large companies become truly irrevelant is through: 1) Bad management 2) Ground shifting / seismic shift on the ecosystem or tech. (Think Kodak). FB has been very proactive in acquiring new trendy companies and in retrospect Instagram’s acquisition was a genius move. (I remember how much talk was at the time at the 1b price for a company with no revenue). Google has been proactive by doing active research, and amazon by doing all kinds of things. Yahoo and Twitter are classically badly managed companies and while yahoo got sold to irrevelance, I think Twitter is the next one to be truly disrupted.
- tehlike 9y ago
  Google has recently diversified into many other sub-bets. How about FB? What are they diversifying in?
  - elsewhen 9y ago
    VR, Video, Messaging
    - tehlike 9y ago
      Video is part of its social focus, so is messaging. VR... i don't know about that.
- zdw 9y ago

noncoml 9y ago

And then what? There was a time that we thought MS could not be beaten. It did. And now we have Google and FB. Are they any better? Why do you think the ones who will beat FB and Google will be better? If anything, I expect them to be worst, as SV tech geeks are being replaced by power and money seeking individuals.

tehlike 9y ago
MS is still kicking.
- esturk 9y ago
  The parent post didn't say MS is dead just that it was beaten and indeed it was. MS was thought to be unbeatable as the "consumer facing OS". But mobile OSes came about from an entirely new market (this being mobile) that supplanted the desktop in consumer's daily lives.
  - junkscience2017 9y ago
    Who beat Microsoft in what? Microsoft's primary business is Windows. Who has beaten Windows? Obviously new businesses have been born that Microsoft would love to own...but so far, there has still been no successful assault on the main business
    - jacksmith21006 9y ago
      Google in AI, browsers, streaming video, search, mobile and a number of other things.
    - esturk 9y ago
      Who: Apple and Google What: Enter a new Market that 'was' supplanting an existing market I'm not sure what you meant by business here. Windows is a product from MS which is segmented by different markets. There's a business need and a consumer facing need. It got beat in the latter. It also didn't move fast enough to reach the mobile market so it got beat in speed as well. The consumer facing product has been assaulted. Consumers are buying PCs, and by extension Windows, less. MS was impacted and Ballmer resigned. That was the whole pivot to the Cloud by Satya. All this is common knowledge.

lubujackson 9y ago

I think the most surprising vulnerability for Google is web search. Google has been pushing away from web search for years now, with moves like AMP, vertical searches and quick answers that keep you on their domain. If you look at the mission statement for their search team it is now something like "answer your questions" - which is great 90% of the time, but what no longer exists (with most people not realizing) is a good general search engine for the WEB, meaning the collection of websites out there. There is no longer a sense of serendipity or of finding a cool new website, and maybe finding web pages on the web is just a nostagic thing with no real benefit, but there's no doubt that Google has moved away from that as real objective. The reality is that the web has become overwhelmed by listicles and minimum pages that go one inch past Google's definition of spam, but otherwise muck up the web. It would be amazing for a search engine to sift past all that cruft and low-effort material to find actually interesting and unique content. In a way, simply by not being Google is already an advantage because everyone is catering to Google. If you use a different standard you can easily get different results - it's just a matter if those would be useful for anyone? Everyone mostly wants to see the "right" answer and Google has conditioned us to expect it.

tspike 9y ago
If someone nailed discussion search, I'd have no use for Google for 90% of my searching. As it is, most of my searches are a series of: site:<reddit/ycombinator/stackoverflow/tripadvisor/random niche forum.com> "something someone interested in the same question/topic would say" .. all in an attempt to filter over-commercialized bullshit. There's an opportunity here for a startup to capture an audience hungry for real information and leverage them into becoming the next hub for over-commercialized bullshit.
- dvddgld 9y ago
  I use the same kind of search for most of my searching. Does anyone have any tips to add to this? e.g specific sites for any particular demands, or any other tricks
  - fosco 9y ago

tabeth 9y ago

Whether or not they can be beaten is one thing. The other thing is whether or not they'll fail to buy their competitor.

junkscience2017 9y ago

a frontal assault on any of these will prove futile...ask Snap, ask Jet.com (who wisely got acquired before Amazon could be bothered to vaporize then) they're still rising...but even if they stopped rising, they have amassed the financial resources of nations, and they have the credit to borrow much more. Apple in particular is basically a G8 nation...their cash pile may literally span centuries and they may actually need to hedge against the expiration of the governments whose currency they hold. unlike oil, we will not "run out" of data...these companies will eventually dwarf anything from the industrial age if you want to "beat" them, (what does that even mean?) do what Elon Musk is doing and create new markets and industries

njarboe 9y ago
And off-earth colonies.
manigandham 9y ago
Jet.com was basically engineered to be sold, never was a serious contender.

ImSkeptical 9y ago

This article doesn't inspire much faith in me as a reader. The first example of a start up beating a tech giant is Snap competing with Facebook. Snap did well for a while, but things are looking grim last I heard. Likewise, the author, in the comments, suggests that the big three priorities of Amazon are AWS, Groceries, and Prime. Seems to be forgetting the two largest categories of Amazon's business - foreign and domestic retail markets. Omissions like that make question the rigor of the analysis over all. Speaking of being able to focus on three things, why? Why that number? Isn't Amazon, for example, competing in Cloud computing, e Books, retail, tablets, content, groceries, home assistants, advertising, and probably a few other major categories? Likewise Microsoft has game consoles, office, cloud offerings, Windows, search, and again, other areas. I think the thesis, that you can compete with tech giants, is true, but the analysis of the article is brief and poor. The reason you can compete with tech giants is because they are looking for a way to grow their gigantic companies and so they will forgo relatively small markets even if they are promising. I would not bet on your startup to beat Amazon in making budget tablets, or Apple in making premium ones, but if you can identify a niche with a customer that needs to be served you can outcompete major companies because they won't be willing to focus on that niche. For example, you can't make a better budget or premium tablet, but maybe you make a tablet that floats to serve fishermen. It's a hit, so you work on connecting it to their fish finders, now you're building custom sonar sensors because your brand has a reputation and you want to add features to the tablet. Before you know it, you have a self-driving boat, and you're entering the shipping market automating the work formerly done by seamen. With a big presence in shipping you use your connections in China to start up your own retail website, and now you can compete with Amazon directly because you can arrange cheaper shipping of goods from China to US marketplaces. I also do think there is some validity to the article's point that you'll be competing against the C team. I'd add on to it that as a startup you'll be more agile. If you're competing against a tech giant they'll be held up by a lot of bureaucracy that won't afflict you. You can match their dev team for competence, move faster, and compete in spaces where they won't want to follow. That's how you won against big companies, not because they are magically limited to paying attention to three areas.

dingaling 9y ago
> forgetting the two largest categories of Amazon's business - foreign and domestic retail markets I don't buy much on Amazon nowadays but on about 50% of times when I do go there to buy a non-book product it has been reclassified as "Prime-only" Normally that passes after a week or so but it does show that Amazon is prepared to sacrifice spontaneous retail sales in order to promote Prime.

joshvm 9y ago

Amazon is in a weird place right now. In the recent past, Amazon was the place to get stuff online - cheaper than most places and Prime shipping was a big win. I don't think they're going anywhere, but there's still an awful lot of stuff you can't buy on there, or is difficult to find. Now some departments are getting more like Etsy - a Shenzhen marketplace. This is good, because there's a lot of random stuff you can get that you don't need to import. It's also bad because it's virtually impossible to know what you should buy if you don't know the brand reputation (and that matters to you). Take 'usb cable' for example, have a look: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=usb+cable https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias... Brands include Rephoenix, Luoriz, Ugreen, Syncwire, RAVPower, Rankie, Benestellar, Onson, Jecent, Emmabin, Brightsnow, Maxteck, choetech, Volutz, Kinps, the list goes on. I got to page 3 before I gave up. What about headphones? Mpow, OneOdio, BienSound, Alihen, Sephia, ZIYE, Sadon, OMORC, etc. I'm genuinely curious as to when sellers decided that they must have a brand name for every product, and to hell with the meaning. It's like they all read those "how to sell on Amazon by importing" tutorials. Even though deep down I know that they're probably just as good as anything you can buy on the high street, the sheer volume of random brands is really off-putting to me for some reason. A bigger problem is that you can miss stuff in the noise - e.g. if you didn't know that Anker have a good reputation, could you tell the difference from any of the other names in that list? Seller churn is also high, so it's not like you can rely on reviews either - that product might be gone in a month. On a brighter note it really highlights how much you're being ripped off when you buy from a 'name brand' company that's just rebadging stuff from China.

justboxing 9y ago
> the sheer volume of random brands is really off-putting to me for some reason Your example of 'usb cable' is a very good one for highlighting this problem. You are seeing so many brands because of an army of "Amazon Associates Sellers" / FBA - Fullfilled by Amazon Sellers ( I like to refer to them as scam artists) who identify various electronic gadgets, household items, and other things that are in demand, that are light (so cheap to ship) and that are available in bulk in Alibaba or Alibaba Express. They simply slap on their brand logo / name on packaging, pay a few select reviewers to do a 5-star review on amazon and make a whole bunch of sale. So in essence, the chances are that these 10+ brands you are seeing for 'usb cable' are all sourcing the same exact 'Made in China' product from the same factory in China through Alibaba. Do a search for 'Strawberry corer' and you'll see what I mean :) This is a very real problem that amazon has been very slow to resolve. There are even Fiverr gigs that do the product research for cheap. Source: https://www.fiverr.com/gigs/amazon-fba https://www.fiverr.com/gigs/amazon-fba

natural219 9y ago

I got so excited from the title. I also want Amazon, Facebook, and Google to be beaten. I am however not excited about just another hypergrowth-driven, capture-the-whole-market-or-die, walled garden, more-of-the-same traditional startup. I want the forms of these companies to die, and a patchwork economy of more medium-sized firms each providing a piece of the puzzle without trying to capture the whole thing. That's just me, though.

raspasov 9y ago

What about Apple? Does anyone think that they can be beaten? What makes Apple different from Google, Amazon & Facebook? Curious to hear what people think.

chrisvalleybay 9y ago
Paraphrasing from the book The Four by Scott Galloway: Apple is a company that has positioned itself as a luxury brand. Apple is about sex and signalling. Carrying an Apple phone signals more status than if you were to carry an Android phone, since it is more expensive, just like with other luxury items. But in addition to attaining this status, it has done something that many other luxury brands have not: low production costs in addition to premium pricing. Now, no other techbrand is a luxury brand, which puts Apple in its own league. Either it's going to take a very long time to unseat Apple, or they need to miss a big new market, that they didn't see coming. Now, most of us believe AR/VR and AI to be the next market, if they aren't able to get to market fast enough with products that we have come to expect from Apple, this can be an issue. I recommend reading the book by Scott Galloway, it is insightful.
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  He has some insights, but also injects a lot of naive and grating political signaling into analysis, which makes him sometimes hard to take seriously.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jbreckmckye 9y ago
    I have never read _The Four_, but stopped by to make a quick complaint: can we please retire the verb "signalling" in political discourse? As far as I can tell all "political signalling" means is "I cannot believe what you profess to believe, therefore I assume that you profess it merely to be trendy".
    - 9y ago

junkscience2017 9y ago

forget about Schumpterian disruption, strap in for some real dystopia. Think about Apple with a standing army to protect it's assets. Think about Google governoring cities. Think about Amazon buying the interstate system. Think about Facebook having a seat on the UN Security Council. At least one of the above will be true by 2040.

ttoinou 9y ago
But then there will be competition in "army to protect company assets", "company governed cities" "company owned interstate system" and "company UN security council" ! Good news :D

adamnemecek 9y ago

I can actually imagine a new search engine. The thing about google is that it’s not power user friendly. Give me some query language. And let me somehow search for things related to the swift language without getting results about the singer.

homarp 9y ago
Power users don't watch ads, as they have ad blockers.
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  Make me pay then. Like by giving me more power, I'm reducing the expectations on the product. I dont want magic, I want power.
  - jabretti 9y ago
    If I'm going to pay for search it's better be a lot better than google. And google has a twenty year head start and a gazillion dollars and can rapidly implement any clever feature you might think of.
    - adamnemecek 9y ago
      Can they? They won’t touch the interface whatsoever. Also a lot of times I care only about a subset of the internet. Google won’t let me specify what subset.
      - jjeaff 9y ago
        1. Ban eHow (and the few other sites like it. 2. Ban any site that shows different content to the Google bot vs the user. (looking at you Quora, with your login required to read, Pinterest...) 3. Ban all the myriad of sites that do nothing but list out every possible phone number or random words. AI should have no trouble detecting those. 4. Ban all the sites that do nothing but copy content wholesale from other sites. I thought they had a duplicate content penalty, but it doesn't seem to work. Do those simple things and you've just made Google search 10x better.

likelynew 9y ago

I think with many small countries outside US/Europe becoming developed, one needs a shopping site with wide variety of international products and minimal shipping rate.

myf01d 9y ago

Personally I wish Facebook to be destroyed, it's kind of a psychological cancer. I also guess Amazon can't be destroyed unless with a series of defeats within a very long period, it may be transformed into another Microsoft or IBM at worst but it won't be destroyed.

QML 9y ago
What’s wrong with Facebook? I personally don’t think of social networks as malevolent — in the end they’re just tools. The real issue in my opinion is the type of content that is peddled to me.
- elsewhen 9y ago
  Facebook's engagement-maximizing algorithm determines what content gets shown to you, and the peculiarities of that algorithm indirectly inform content creators. many content creators experience the following: when they publish something thin/clickbaity they get a bunch of views, whereas when they publish something nuanced/complex they only get a few. this effect effectively establishes a race to the bottom.
  - Viliam1234 9y ago
    I am just a random Facebook user, and I already noticed the same effect on my wall: stupid things get liked and shared, anything of value is mostly ignored. It happened a few months ago when as a result of reading some online stories, I decided to delete everything I posted on my Facebook wall; but then I changed my decision to "everything, except for the few best (highest quality? best ratings? maybe a bit of both) things". So I spent a few hours deleting stuff from my wall, while paying attention to the quality and number of likes. And I noticed the pattern that I didn't actually notice before. I was already aware that I sometimes post smart content and sometimes stupid content, and that sometimes I get a lot of reactions and sometimes barely any. But only now I noticed how strongly are these things anticorrelated. It is almost always the stupid stuff that gets most reactions, and the smart stuff that remains ignored. Dozens and dozens of my old posts, always the same pattern. After seeing this, I am no longer motivated to spend any energy on my Facebook interaction. Once in a while I share an interesting article, but I don't bother posting a summary anymore; I already expect no one will care, if even someone will see it. And once in a while I share a family photo. And that's all.

guylepage3 9y ago

They definitely can be beaten but not for the reasons stated in this article. Network effects cannot be undone without a fundamental shift in their business models. Right now Facebook and Google make their money off advertising and tracking their users. Break the business model and incentivize a Network and a new Network can grow.

jv22222 9y ago

It's a bit arbitrary to say that a company is only good at three things. Also, the bad hiring A -> B -> C players only makes sense if the "three things" are all in the same business domain because then the A listers from the same domain are used up. But, when Google is doing things like Android, Self Driving Cars, Youtube, Glucose Sensing Contact Lenses etc. Each domain is different and interesting enough to attract top talent. (When we say Google, we mean Alphabet, right?) Amazon is such a wild thing and always iterating on new ideas (Alexa, AWS, Etc) I highly doubt they will be limited to "3" things. Also, Amazon have a great trick of commercializing all the services they create for themselves, which seems like it will just keep adding hedges and more surface area of revenue. Microsoft, still huge. Sure they didn't win search but they have so many other strings to their bow (Xbox, Surface, Windows, etc) Funny thing is, Microsoft didn't exactly own the search market and then "get beaten" by Google. Google just aced that from the get go and essentially created that market growth by making it possible to search the web so well. Slack is a great example of how that works. There were lots of players making team chat and the market was not so huge. Then along comes Slack and makes something that is a delight and useful for many people, so much so, that it creates a new outsized market that didn't quite exist in that way before. So, rather than "get beaten" I think the most likely scenario is that new players will continue to come along and create versions of "products that don't suck" and as a result markets that were once small will, all of a sudden, become huge. I also think blockchain, right now, is like the internet was in say, 1998, and there will be some huge companies emerging from that tech.

krawut 9y ago
> I also think blockchain, right now, is like the internet was in say, 1998, and there will be some huge companies emerging from that tech. Why do so many people seem to think this? As someone with a background in crypto, I just don't see the resemblance. Blockchains are useful for proof-of-work and Merkle Trees give you a way to compress many individual signatures, but those things are inherently made for distributed decision making and this comes with a lot of overhead. The exact opposite of what a corporation needs.
- ttoinou 9y ago

mankash666 9y ago

The more relevant question is "can your startup succeed?" Google's C product is another big incumbent's A product. For your startup to succeed, you often times need to beat most other competitors, many of whom consider the product their A listing.

partycoder 9y ago

And that's why companies get acquired all the time. In fact, many startups are created with the purpose of being sold to larger companies.

DmitryOlshansky 9y ago

The biggest issue with a project under big tech giant is that they could afford to trash it at the moment notice. There is super low commitment on new projects (say <1% of work force), compared to a startup that is betting all money and talent it could get on a chance that there is an overlooked market for product X. 100% focus, staying far from a comfort zone and taking the risk is what (in a very few cases though) makes it work. Basically tech gaint doesn’t have to “burn the ships” and therefore has lower commitment, poor focus, has no sense of (get big or go home) urgency and eventually drops the idea before it bears fruit. It can offord to say “pass”, but doesn’t need to “bluf” and it doesn’t have the same risk.

virgilp 9y ago
On the contrary, my experience on the enterprise is the exact opposite: the new projects where the commitment is a high % of workforce are the biggest failures: the pressure to "deliver value" so overwhelming, that you can't "fail your way to success". You've got one shot to succeed. Do you know any startup who succeeded from the first shot? (and it gets worse - since you have a lot of "resources", you also can't move fast, because there's a lot of synchronization overhead: you can only employ a significant workforce once you know _very well_ what needs to be done; on new projects, that's never the case.)

lkrubner 9y ago

Standard Oil, AT&T and Microsoft can all be beaten -- just as soon as the government steps in and takes action against them. Capital tends to concentrate over time. It takes government action to break up monopolies. There are very few examples of monopolies fading away on their own.

Someone 9y ago

Rome could be beaten, too, but before that happened, a lot of incumbents failed, and Rome bought quite a few others before they became too powerful. And yes, there are multiple winners. Some nibbled at Rome’s borders, carving out a sizable chunk for themselves, some conquered Rome (often not with much long lasted gains for themselves). The big question is what made those who beat it winners. I would guess lucky timing is a huge factor there. That’s what anybody trying to take (parts of) those giants head on should be worried about.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago

"How did Snapchat beat Facebook to the youth market over the last few years? (Remember Poke?). How did Facebook beat Google in social media in the early 2000s? (Remember Orkut?) How did Google beat Yahoo and Microsoft in search?" 1. It wasn't Facebook who beat Google. It was Google who lost to Facebook. 2. It wasn't Google who beat Yahoo and Microsoft. It was Microsoft and Yahoo who lost to Google. 3. Lastly, Snapchat LOST to Facebook. I don't know where he even pulls this out of. Unlike his takeaway which is nonsense and will probably make you waste years trying to make something stupid happen, here's my takeaway--which is actually opposite of what he'saying--that's much more helpful: Don't try to fight against a giant in their own turf. As Snapchat, you will never beat Facebook in their own game, Social. As Google, you will never beat Facebook in their own game, Social (This goes both ways. There have been many rumors about Facebook entering search engine arena, but that will never work). Microsoft and Yahoo (A portal whose business model used to be opposite to Google's) can never beat Google in its own game. The lesson is, play your own game. Don't play into these VCs telling you it's ok to make these stupid attempts. In their eyes, you the founder is just a number. And even if so, this is a terrible advice because there are so many other ways you can win "against" google, facebook, amazon--You simply don't play against them. Google "beat" Microsoft by dominating their own category. Facebook "beat" Google by dominating their own category. And lastly, Snapchat couldn't "beat" Facebook because they decided to follow stupid advice like this guy gave and fight against Facebook instead of dominating its own category. It had potential at first to invent a differentiated category of its own but went off rails becoming just another social media app, which Facebook then swiftly copied.

jacksmith21006 9y ago
Chrome came later and beat MS. The same with Google and mobile. Google just provided better solutions.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  To be precise there were two phases. Firefox came and beat MS IE first. Then a while later, Chrome came and beat Firefox. This is a completely different story though. First of all, Chrome. Chrome is not a startup. It's a product launched by Google, one of the richest tech companies in the world (and given away for free because they didn't care about directly making money from it). What REALLY happened was it nearly killed off Firefox which was way way poorly funded. So this is irrelevant to this discussion where the topic is about "startups". Second, let's talk about Firefox. Firefox didn't really "beat" IE because they didn't really make much money out of it. Firefox was a very special case. It wasn't some startup which went against MS. It was a result of Netscape losing to MS, and then deciding to open source it while they're going out of business. This is not exactly the best scenario when you're building a startup, and even if we're arguing based purely on product (and not whether the company actually managed to extract value out of it), again it's irrelevant to this current thread because Firefox is NOT a "startup". Lastly, if you're looking at this type of rare occasion and hoping your startup will work out that way, then go ahead and do so, I don't care. I'm just saying there are way better ways to "beat" Google, Facebook, and Amazon. And that's by NOT trying to beat them.

AmIFirstToThink 9y ago

Google search pretty much has turned into a glorified DNS lookup system. A good public DNS with search/blocking combined, may be self hosted for those interested in doing so, would go a long way to eat into Google Search use cases. Address/phone number lookup and website lookup for a company would probably cover 50%+ use of Google search. Huge opportunity to disrupt. I wanted Google to succeed, I believed in their vision and then 2016 happened, I saw YouTube go downhill in less than a month. If that is how they want to wield their power, for those political goals, then I want them reduced to likes of Yahoo. Thousands of engineer's work over past 20 years, hijacked by political hacks who inserted themselves in the decision making process of Google, a negative side effect of Google's involvement in 2016 election campaigns. Either Google unwinds that, or time to wind Google down.

cvaidya1986 9y ago

Anyone working on such startups? Secretly? :D