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Which means Facebook is not pressed by competitors as of now. They hold onto a bunch of cool features ready to swith on, just in case competition strike. Any co
by dexen 15y ago
Which means Facebook is not pressed by competitors as of now. They hold onto a bunch of cool features ready to swith on, just in case competition strike. Any competitor will face doubly uphill battle -- both against the network effect and against a fresh reserve of new features, enabled as soon as the Facebook notices them.
My take-away from the story -- little competition results in slow progress.
- nostrademons 15y agoOftentimes, these features are in "reserve" because they're conducting experiments to measure the effect on user behavior, or because various parts of the fit & finish aren't done yet, or because there're still serious open questions about certain edge cases. It's usually not the case that they're waiting for the competition to press them; at that point, you just risk losing your reputation as an innovator. The first prototypes of Google Instant were done in 2000 or 2002, I think, and Yahoo had a demo ready in 2006. Yet it wasn't until 2010 that a production implementation could actually launch. You could argue that the code existed back then, but there were a bunch of blockers in capacity, user experience, and user experience that prevented it from being a launchable feature.