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I completely agree with this. After reading some of the examples in the list (E-Sports vs. Traditional Sports, Hybrid Cars vs Electric Cars), it was clear the c

I completely agree with this. After reading some of the examples in the list (E-Sports vs. Traditional Sports, Hybrid Cars vs Electric Cars), it was clear the concept was not fully baked. This one needs to go back in the oven for a bit. In the case of hybrids vs. electrics, it's fine if you want to say hybrids are like the Blackberry - an initiating technology that prepares the market for a sweeping, fundamental change. But that's certainly different from Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, two technologies that aim to accomplish different things, or streaming music vs MP3 downloads, which offer two different value propositions in the lease vs. own models. The idea needs to be more specific, like initiating technology vs. mature technology or evolutionary technology vs. revolutionary technology. One could say the Blackberry or the Palm Pilot was actually the revolution, where the iPhone was the right evolution of that technology to fully capture the market. But now I'm just trying to backfit a backfitted concept.

red_admiral 8y ago
I've been thinking about this a bit today. Spolsky's old "Amazon vs Ben and Jerrys" is in my opinion a more mature categorisation of what strong/weak is getting at here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-ben-and-jerrys-vs-amazon/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-... I think Paul Graham had an article too on how venture capitalists are not looking for "does this have growth potential" (there are already more traditional capitalists for that called "banks") but "could this have a 1% chance at being the next facebook, even if it has a 99% chance of failing?" In this particular sense, I guess the more radical something looks, the better. I also remember a HN article a while ago about "how Trello could have been a success" where success means "going unicorn", to which commenters rightly pointed out that Trello IS a success at what it set out to do. Trello would come under "weak" / "ben and jerrys" in this categorisation I suppose, although it's one of the cloud services I use every day and a lot more than most others.

red_admiral 8y ago

I've been thinking about this a bit today. Spolsky's old "Amazon vs Ben and Jerrys" is in my opinion a more mature categorisation of what strong/weak is getting at here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-ben-and-jerrys-vs-amazon/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-... I think Paul Graham had an article too on how venture capitalists are not looking for "does this have growth potential" (there are already more traditional capitalists for that called "banks") but "could this have a 1% chance at being the next facebook, even if it has a 99% chance of failing?" In this particular sense, I guess the more radical something looks, the better. I also remember a HN article a while ago about "how Trello could have been a success" where success means "going unicorn", to which commenters rightly pointed out that Trello IS a success at what it set out to do. Trello would come under "weak" / "ben and jerrys" in this categorisation I suppose, although it's one of the cloud services I use every day and a lot more than most others.