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AWS was a novel offering. WeWork appeals to dad followers and people so green that they don't know Regus and others exist. It might be attractive from a SV VC s

AWS was a novel offering. WeWork appeals to dad followers and people so green that they don't know Regus and others exist. It might be attractive from a SV VC social perspective, but it's not meaningful as an business-model proposition. It's like opening a chain to compete with McD and Wendy's with the value prop "we have an efficient quick-servoce hexagonal burgers". The valuable part isn't new, and the new part isn't changing fundamentals.

caseysoftware 7y ago
While I'm not a fan of WeWork, it's not just newbs. They've been useful to allow established companies to expand and "open an office" in a given city with a handful of employees without the time, expensive, and effort of a long term lease. My company has done it at least twice for a year+ before they grew it into a full office.
- twic 7y ago
  There were already other suppliers that would allowed companies to do this.
gamblor956 7y ago
Success frequently hinges on execution, not changing the fundamentals. The entire premise of the free market is that market competition rewards those who execute the fundamentals the best. If changing fundamentals was a requirement for success most businesses would fail against the incumbent. After all, there are plenty of competitors to McDs and Wendy's, most of who are doing quite well even though there's a McDs on nearly every corner and all burgers basically follow the same recipe. (That being said, I think WeWork isn't executing very fell. I'm partial to Cross Campus if I must use a hipsterish co-working space, and Regis if I want to use a professional temporary working space.
sturgill 7y ago
AWS in the early days wasn’t that different than many other cloud providers of the day: you had Rackspace, Linode, Slicehost, etc. And then there’s the oversold shared hosting... WeWork isn’t a brand new offering; Regus has been around for awhile. But it has mindshare and that has value. The question is will it be an AWS or pets.com. I won’t answer that for you, but I’m not putting my money into its IPO... ;)
- smacktoward 7y ago
  > AWS in the early days wasn’t that different than many other cloud providers of the day I'm sorry, but this just isn't true. The very first product launched under the AWS banner was S3, which was fundamentally different than anything else on the market. There were tons of companies offering shared and VPS hosting, but nobody offering an API-driven, usage-billed storage service like S3. A few months later they launched EC2, which was absolutely comparable to the various VPS hosts (if differentiated somewhat by its API-driven use model). But S3 was first, and it made a loud and clear statement that AWS was aiming to build something unlike anything else on the market at the time.
  - tams 7y ago
    SQS was introduced before S3, but the analogy might still be valid.
  - sturgill 7y ago
    S3 was (and is) amazing. But for me AWS as an infrastructure replacement started when EC2 was launched (at least in the context of the current discussion relative to WeWork).

caseysoftware 7y ago

While I'm not a fan of WeWork, it's not just newbs. They've been useful to allow established companies to expand and "open an office" in a given city with a handful of employees without the time, expensive, and effort of a long term lease. My company has done it at least twice for a year+ before they grew it into a full office.

twic 7y ago
There were already other suppliers that would allowed companies to do this.

gamblor956 7y ago

Success frequently hinges on execution, not changing the fundamentals. The entire premise of the free market is that market competition rewards those who execute the fundamentals the best. If changing fundamentals was a requirement for success most businesses would fail against the incumbent. After all, there are plenty of competitors to McDs and Wendy's, most of who are doing quite well even though there's a McDs on nearly every corner and all burgers basically follow the same recipe. (That being said, I think WeWork isn't executing very fell. I'm partial to Cross Campus if I must use a hipsterish co-working space, and Regis if I want to use a professional temporary working space.

sturgill 7y ago

AWS in the early days wasn’t that different than many other cloud providers of the day: you had Rackspace, Linode, Slicehost, etc. And then there’s the oversold shared hosting... WeWork isn’t a brand new offering; Regus has been around for awhile. But it has mindshare and that has value. The question is will it be an AWS or pets.com. I won’t answer that for you, but I’m not putting my money into its IPO... ;)

smacktoward 7y ago
> AWS in the early days wasn’t that different than many other cloud providers of the day I'm sorry, but this just isn't true. The very first product launched under the AWS banner was S3, which was fundamentally different than anything else on the market. There were tons of companies offering shared and VPS hosting, but nobody offering an API-driven, usage-billed storage service like S3. A few months later they launched EC2, which was absolutely comparable to the various VPS hosts (if differentiated somewhat by its API-driven use model). But S3 was first, and it made a loud and clear statement that AWS was aiming to build something unlike anything else on the market at the time.
- tams 7y ago
  SQS was introduced before S3, but the analogy might still be valid.
- sturgill 7y ago
  S3 was (and is) amazing. But for me AWS as an infrastructure replacement started when EC2 was launched (at least in the context of the current discussion relative to WeWork).