7 ms·

And yet, most people love the stability of existing systems. Trying something new is betting with your time: if the startup goes defunct in x years, you've crea

by judge2020 4y ago

And yet, most people love the stability of existing systems. Trying something new is betting with your time: if the startup goes defunct in x years, you've created work for yourself to migrate to a competitor, and that's a big risk to take if you're a medium or large business evaluating a B2B product that maybe only has Series B funding (and is dependent on massive growth to survive without being sold off to some investment firm due to pressure from their existing investors).

kennywinker 4y ago
With decent anti-trust, we would have many many more stable mid-size companies. I.e. startups that FAANG snapped up on their ascendence to stability, that would now be successful in their own right. Some examples to rattle off a few household names: instagram, whatsapp, youtube, tumblr, android, beats, audible.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Instagram became big because of Facebook’s cross promotion and adTech. YouTube had huge storage and bandwidth costs and was about to be sued out of existence. Tumblr wasn’t exactly doing great before being bought by Yahoo and Yahoo wasn’t exactly a monopoly when it acquired Tumblr and its current owner is definitely not that big. How do you think Android would have succeeded when better funded companies like Microsoft, RIM and Palm failed to make a dent? Beats was already profitable before being acquired by Apple. No one can credible claim that Apple has a “monopoly” on headphones or in streaming music.
  - dima_vm 4y ago
    Instagram might not became that big, but it definitely was on track to become somewhat big, that's why Facebook bought it, in fear of competition. Same, Youtube might go down, but the idea was out of the box now, someone else would do that. Technology (ContentID) was there as well. As a consumer, I don't mind if it'd be called differently done by different team. It might have been better or worse of course.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      How was Instagram going to become profitable? YouTube’s issue wasn’t just being sued, the storage and bandwidth costs are huge and YouTube was losing billions. Rumors are that YouTube is still not profitable.
      - kennywinker 4y ago
        Ads or a subscription service. Not that complicated. With that many eyeballs you don’t need to be a genius to make money off it.
        Tanoc 4y ago
        Google over-leveraged advertising on Youtube however. Most Youtube viewers use an adblocker on PC, and adblock is becoming more common on Android with each passing month. All because AdSense went with a more lax policy of moderation for ads after the 2017 fallout caused by Matt Watson scared away big advertisers like Frito-Lay and Toyota. The result was all ads were either falsely advertised Android games, multi-level marketing scams, or even nakedly racist political ads in the runup to the 2018 congressional elections. Adblock rates exploded, cutting Youtube's income and causing a panic response of running even more ads and locking users into seeing them. To this day Youtube still has a lax vetting policy for advertising partners, and actively hateful, harmful, or overtly false ads stay up for weeks until enough users report them. As for subscriptions... Well, they tried that with Youtube Red. And then Youtube Premium. And then Youtube Music. Every time people turned it down, because the benefits weren't worth the cost each month considering all the features touted could be found legally for free elsewhere. And when video creators outed Red by showing they'd get a paltry amount of that revenue, despite Youtube saying the money from subscriptions would be used to pay them, even more of the viewing audience turned against it. When you're in the uniquely precarious position of hosting high cost user-generated content, it's very easy for outside forces to break you over their knee and send you into a death spiral.
        scarface74 4y ago
        How are ad supported companies outside of Google and Facebook doing today?
  - kennywinker 4y ago
    Traditional anti-trust (the kind we haven’t seen for at least 30 years now) is about preventing companies from creating monopolies - which requires proactive steps BEFORE they become a monopoly not when they go to purchase their last competitor. That said, afaik the beats acquisition wasn’t about headphones as much as the streaming service… digital music is a market that apple was the largest player in for a long time (may still be idk?). Rim and microsoft were squeezed out by android, That wasn’t an inevitable outcome - it was the result of google buying android. Google staying entrenched as the top search engine may also have something to do with their ownership of android. You can pick apart some of my examples, sure, but if even one of those is true then of the hundreds (thousands?) of companies acquired by faang you must know that a good percentage of those would be viable stable workplaces… they were purchased usually because of that exact threat! and then repeat that for every industry in the economy with large players in it…
    - scarface74 4y ago
      They were squeezed out by Android that was given away for free. How was a hypothetical Android company going to survive giving its only product away for free? > you must know that a good percentage of those would be viable stable workplaces How many former unicorns that did go public in the last decade are actually profitable today?
      - passwordoops 4y ago
        And how many funders, seeing that unicorns are illusions bound for failure in a market where anti trust is enforced, would invest in better and more stable start ups worth actual real-world business plans?
        scarface74 4y ago
        Doesn’t that argue against Android being successful as a stand alone entity? Android had no business model.
        4y ago
- gofreddygo 4y ago
  Don't forget Pebble.
  - Danieru 4y ago
    Vine
  - adastra22 4y ago
    I miss my pebble :( Also Fitbit, nest.
makeitdouble 4y ago
From being on both sides of the fence (providing B2B software as a startup, and dealing with small businesses as a client), smaller entities will be expected to adapt to the bigger fish. Startups will bring translation layers to fit inside an existing system, and as a big client you can often send them the exact interface they need to adhere to and they’ll deal with it. In that sense, the switching cost can be minimal (and you might keep your existing system running in parrallel), and if you’re big enough you’ll have the option to outright buy the smaller business if it were to flail. It’s more complicated I think on the B2C side, where you have to buy more trust and establish a brand for people to give your their data and/or money.
blowski 4y ago
People are complicated! I like being healthy, but I also like eating pizza with mountains of cheese. Wearing my “enterprise architect” hat, I love stability. I don’t want to choose a technology that just might be the silver bullet but probably isn’t, and will in fact be abandoned and need replacing in 2 years. But with my “Hacker News reader” hat on, stability is boring. Constantly inventing and testing new ways of doing things is how we progress as a species. Anti-trust speeds that up and so I love it. I guess I want a constant churn of innovation with other people bearing the risk. Perhaps if anti-trust were more aggressive it would at least level the playing field - at the moment, most innovation is from companies who can afford to drop $10B as an experiment. (And they get a tax refund either way.)

kennywinker 4y ago

With decent anti-trust, we would have many many more stable mid-size companies. I.e. startups that FAANG snapped up on their ascendence to stability, that would now be successful in their own right. Some examples to rattle off a few household names: instagram, whatsapp, youtube, tumblr, android, beats, audible.

scarface74 4y ago
Instagram became big because of Facebook’s cross promotion and adTech. YouTube had huge storage and bandwidth costs and was about to be sued out of existence. Tumblr wasn’t exactly doing great before being bought by Yahoo and Yahoo wasn’t exactly a monopoly when it acquired Tumblr and its current owner is definitely not that big. How do you think Android would have succeeded when better funded companies like Microsoft, RIM and Palm failed to make a dent? Beats was already profitable before being acquired by Apple. No one can credible claim that Apple has a “monopoly” on headphones or in streaming music.
- dima_vm 4y ago
  Instagram might not became that big, but it definitely was on track to become somewhat big, that's why Facebook bought it, in fear of competition. Same, Youtube might go down, but the idea was out of the box now, someone else would do that. Technology (ContentID) was there as well. As a consumer, I don't mind if it'd be called differently done by different team. It might have been better or worse of course.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    How was Instagram going to become profitable? YouTube’s issue wasn’t just being sued, the storage and bandwidth costs are huge and YouTube was losing billions. Rumors are that YouTube is still not profitable.
    - kennywinker 4y ago
      Ads or a subscription service. Not that complicated. With that many eyeballs you don’t need to be a genius to make money off it.
      - Tanoc 4y ago
        Google over-leveraged advertising on Youtube however. Most Youtube viewers use an adblocker on PC, and adblock is becoming more common on Android with each passing month. All because AdSense went with a more lax policy of moderation for ads after the 2017 fallout caused by Matt Watson scared away big advertisers like Frito-Lay and Toyota. The result was all ads were either falsely advertised Android games, multi-level marketing scams, or even nakedly racist political ads in the runup to the 2018 congressional elections. Adblock rates exploded, cutting Youtube's income and causing a panic response of running even more ads and locking users into seeing them. To this day Youtube still has a lax vetting policy for advertising partners, and actively hateful, harmful, or overtly false ads stay up for weeks until enough users report them. As for subscriptions... Well, they tried that with Youtube Red. And then Youtube Premium. And then Youtube Music. Every time people turned it down, because the benefits weren't worth the cost each month considering all the features touted could be found legally for free elsewhere. And when video creators outed Red by showing they'd get a paltry amount of that revenue, despite Youtube saying the money from subscriptions would be used to pay them, even more of the viewing audience turned against it. When you're in the uniquely precarious position of hosting high cost user-generated content, it's very easy for outside forces to break you over their knee and send you into a death spiral.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        How are ad supported companies outside of Google and Facebook doing today?
- kennywinker 4y ago
  Traditional anti-trust (the kind we haven’t seen for at least 30 years now) is about preventing companies from creating monopolies - which requires proactive steps BEFORE they become a monopoly not when they go to purchase their last competitor. That said, afaik the beats acquisition wasn’t about headphones as much as the streaming service… digital music is a market that apple was the largest player in for a long time (may still be idk?). Rim and microsoft were squeezed out by android, That wasn’t an inevitable outcome - it was the result of google buying android. Google staying entrenched as the top search engine may also have something to do with their ownership of android. You can pick apart some of my examples, sure, but if even one of those is true then of the hundreds (thousands?) of companies acquired by faang you must know that a good percentage of those would be viable stable workplaces… they were purchased usually because of that exact threat! and then repeat that for every industry in the economy with large players in it…
  - scarface74 4y ago
    They were squeezed out by Android that was given away for free. How was a hypothetical Android company going to survive giving its only product away for free? > you must know that a good percentage of those would be viable stable workplaces How many former unicorns that did go public in the last decade are actually profitable today?
    - passwordoops 4y ago
      And how many funders, seeing that unicorns are illusions bound for failure in a market where anti trust is enforced, would invest in better and more stable start ups worth actual real-world business plans?
      - scarface74 4y ago
        Doesn’t that argue against Android being successful as a stand alone entity? Android had no business model.
        4y ago
gofreddygo 4y ago
Don't forget Pebble.
- Danieru 4y ago
  Vine
- adastra22 4y ago
  I miss my pebble :( Also Fitbit, nest.

makeitdouble 4y ago

From being on both sides of the fence (providing B2B software as a startup, and dealing with small businesses as a client), smaller entities will be expected to adapt to the bigger fish. Startups will bring translation layers to fit inside an existing system, and as a big client you can often send them the exact interface they need to adhere to and they’ll deal with it. In that sense, the switching cost can be minimal (and you might keep your existing system running in parrallel), and if you’re big enough you’ll have the option to outright buy the smaller business if it were to flail. It’s more complicated I think on the B2C side, where you have to buy more trust and establish a brand for people to give your their data and/or money.

blowski 4y ago

People are complicated! I like being healthy, but I also like eating pizza with mountains of cheese. Wearing my “enterprise architect” hat, I love stability. I don’t want to choose a technology that just might be the silver bullet but probably isn’t, and will in fact be abandoned and need replacing in 2 years. But with my “Hacker News reader” hat on, stability is boring. Constantly inventing and testing new ways of doing things is how we progress as a species. Anti-trust speeds that up and so I love it. I guess I want a constant churn of innovation with other people bearing the risk. Perhaps if anti-trust were more aggressive it would at least level the playing field - at the moment, most innovation is from companies who can afford to drop $10B as an experiment. (And they get a tax refund either way.)