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> whenever someone comes up with a X-killer they've usually already lost. You mean like an Altavista killer, MySpace killer, or Blockbuster killer? Companies f

• wtallis 16y ago
  There's a big difference between creating a product with the purpose of killing another product, and creating a product with the purpose of being better than another product. Google wasn't an attempt to cash in on any kind of "search engine market", it was an attempt to remedy one of the biggest weaknesses of contemporary search engines: how to usefully rank a now-sufficient number of results. Facebook wasn't intended to kill MySpace - it was intended to be better for a certain category of potential MySpace users: students. Initially, it was only marketed and available to them, and it was only after it had completely taken over that market that it was able to start seriously taking on MySpace. Netflix could be said to have been aimed squarely at Blockbuster, but it's major tradeoffs of long wait times and a subscription model versus Blockbuster's same-day service and pay-as-you-go model made Netflix risky enough that nobody could have reasonably stated at the beginning that it stood a good chance of completely killing blockbuster so quickly. Besides, none of the x-killers we see coming out these days are ever as drastically different as netflix was from Blockbuster; they're usually cheap knockoffs or more expensive versions afflicted by feature creep.