2 ms·
Virtually every industry has some parallel "higher touch luxury version". For a lot of industries, it seems like the existing players are able to service both
by hakfoo 4y ago
Virtually every industry has some parallel "higher touch luxury version".
For a lot of industries, it seems like the existing players are able to service both markets. You've got the classic splits like "Toyota vs. Lexus" or where the same supermarket chain owns both the bougie foodie/organic brand and the ghetto brand.
In the tech space, we haven't seen that as much. There's no obvious technical reason the hyperscaler crowd couldn't offer a premium brand-- "GSuite Deluxe" or "AWS Deluxe" with quality live support. Presumably, their resources and pricing power could run a "freestanding' premium vendor like Zoho into the ground easily.
It seems like so far, this hasn't been in their corporate DNA. I wonder if it's due to a complete fixation on "we'll AI and algorithm as many people out of the process out to pursue higher margins and better scale", to the point they don't even recognize the premium market as worth pursuing. It could be that "we're not interested in a business that isn't a billion dollars/bajillion percent growth rate", even if it offers high margins/stickiness.
A more sinister thought might be that by deliberately discarding an "uninteresting" market, they can feign that their position is weaker when market-competition regulators come to town.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> In the tech space, we haven't seen that as much. Yes, we have. > There's no obvious technical reason the hyperscaler crowd couldn't offer a premium brand-- "GSuite Deluxe" or "AWS Deluxe" with quality live support Google Workspace and AWS each have their own multi-level (3 for Google Workspace, 4 for AWS) progressive scale of how high-touch they are. (For Workspace, which also has product feature tiers, this is a separate axis of differentiation.) This is quite common in software and online services. > Presumably, their resources and pricing power could run a "freestanding' premium vendor like Zoho into the ground easily. Just as Toyota having Lexus and Honda having Acura doesn’t squeeze out McLaren, there’s space in tech for standalone high-touch brands. But, yeah, the big names high-touch offerings are probably doing orders of magnitude more business. > It seems like so far, this hasn't been in their corporate DNA No, the difference is that, sincs its not a consumer but a B2B product, the high-touch version from a mass vendor is just differentiated by being high touch, not be having an entirely separate brand identity despite being the same vendor. In fact, the brand identity is kept because the ability to move up seemlessly as business needs evolve is a selling point.