4 ms·

Sorry for the tone; there is a lot of Google fanboi-ism on HN, so my reaction was as much to the general phenomenon as your post. I think brilliant (well, clev

by wheels 19y ago

Sorry for the tone; there is a lot of Google fanboi-ism on HN, so my reaction was as much to the general phenomenon as your post. I think brilliant (well, clever is usually the word I would use, brilliance is much more rare) ideas are what make 4 guys in a garage able to take on a market leader, but when you've got a merger of companies with a combined market capitalization of over $300 billion, blunt force often does the trick. This is sumo wrestling, not fencing. :-) And in the world of blunt force, the combined forces of the most profitable company in the technology market and the most popular site on the internet could pack a pretty hefty punch. I don't think that's a particularly good strategy for MS to pursue, but I wouldn't misunderestimate them.

Xichekolas 19y ago
> This is sumo wrestling, not fencing. Very good point. I still think big companies can fence. Granted, Amazon's market cap is only like 1/10th of that ($32 billion), but it's AWS products are fairly innovative and leading their space at the moment. So big companies can innovate, they just seem slow and totally random about it. I guess I'm just not seeing what there is to 'blunt force' in the market. You can't force people to buy your ad space. I guess if they could demonstrate clearly more eyeballs and higher CTR than adwords, advertisers would flock... is that what you envision?
- wheels 19y ago
  Big companies can innovate, but the whole MS / Yahoo debacle seems to be about a clash of titans in entrenched spaces. MS has a bigger warchest than Google and with the combined MS / Yahoo they'd have more eyes too. They could run that segment of their market at a loss for a while to try to steal some of Adwords' thunder. Think of MS's entrance into the game console or MP3 player markets. While, again, I don't think it's a great strategy to plow into entrenched markets like that, compared to creating new markets (a la your Amazon example), MS has certainly demonstrated a willingness to do so. In fact, I'd say that's almost they corporate modus operandi; almost their complete history has been bulldozing their way into markets using sheer brawn.

by wheels 19y ago

Xichekolas 19y ago

> This is sumo wrestling, not fencing. Very good point. I still think big companies can fence. Granted, Amazon's market cap is only like 1/10th of that ($32 billion), but it's AWS products are fairly innovative and leading their space at the moment. So big companies can innovate, they just seem slow and totally random about it. I guess I'm just not seeing what there is to 'blunt force' in the market. You can't force people to buy your ad space. I guess if they could demonstrate clearly more eyeballs and higher CTR than adwords, advertisers would flock... is that what you envision?

wheels 19y ago
Big companies can innovate, but the whole MS / Yahoo debacle seems to be about a clash of titans in entrenched spaces. MS has a bigger warchest than Google and with the combined MS / Yahoo they'd have more eyes too. They could run that segment of their market at a loss for a while to try to steal some of Adwords' thunder. Think of MS's entrance into the game console or MP3 player markets. While, again, I don't think it's a great strategy to plow into entrenched markets like that, compared to creating new markets (a la your Amazon example), MS has certainly demonstrated a willingness to do so. In fact, I'd say that's almost they corporate modus operandi; almost their complete history has been bulldozing their way into markets using sheer brawn.