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This is very similar to Ben Thompson's The End of the Beginning article: https://stratechery.com/2020/the-end-of-the-beginning/ https://stratechery.com/2020/the
by broken_clock 3y ago
This is very similar to Ben Thompson's The End of the Beginning article: https://stratechery.com/2020/the-end-of-the-beginning/ https://stratechery.com/2020/the-end-of-the-beginning/
What I took from this article is that you can never beat incumbents by trying to offer a better version of their product. They already have immense institutionalized knowledge and economies of scale. You can only beat them by offering a different product that meets their needs better. Think Walmart vs Amazon. Online shopping is actually a completely different product.
An example today is the iPhone. There are a ton of competitors trying to offer a better version of the same thing, but iPhone share is only growing in the US. Is it possible to offer a product that better suits its niche of mobile general purpose computing? Maybe! But technology today is so capital and knowledge intensive that the kind of organization that can try is probably already about Apple-sized (Vision Pro?).
- causality0 3y agoPersonally I'm really hoping someone tries another gaming phone with buttons built in. There's really no always-with-you gaming solution that doesn't come with massive compromises.
- bombcar 3y agoI’ve always thought the key will be some buttons on the back.
- causality0 3y agoPrepare to be sad after you look up the failed Flitchio, which was a phone case with shoulder buttons and slide pads on the back.
- bombcar 3y agoOh I know it would be hard to sell - maybe it would work if Nintendo sold it as a gaming device that could make calls or something.
- CalRobert 3y agoGod I miss the taco phone. https://sidetalking.com/ https://sidetalking.com/
- candiddevmike 3y agoYou can beat them on customer experience but I have yet to see a company successfully scale it in the tech space (aside from possibly Apple). Everyone hates the incumbent, loves the personalized support, lack of ads, and breadth of features of the challenger, then enshitification happens as the challenger starts scaling.
- tjpnz 3y agoI assume you didn't mean their brick and mortar stores, because some of the customer service I've experienced there has been atrocious. Why should I have to make an appointment just to buy one of their overpriced laptops? That's not how stores work.
- Spooky23 3y agoApple’s stores are too successful - they are beyond capacity. In my area, the Apple Store represents about 40% of the mall’s gross sales. Although part of that is more a function of the decline of malls, the store is expanding for the 3rd time.
- fluidcruft 3y agoWhile I agree the stores are annoying (they seem like annoying jewelry shops filled with poser know-nothing cool kids) but they do have web accessible local inventory. Why do you make an appointment for that? I just buy anything I need online and pick up at the store when the order is ready. It's not like they customize anything. It's basically a glorified shoe store. They either have what you want on the shelf or they don't.
- TexanFeller 3y agoI've never had to make an appointment to walk in and buy something, although they do sometimes ask for a pickup window if you order ahead online. Even in the height of the pandemic I don't think they limited shopping to appointment only.
- smt88 3y ago> Think Walmart vs Amazon. Online shopping is actually a completely different product. This is actually a great example, but not the way you intended it. Amazon isn't beating Walmart. They haven't even dented Walmart's revenue[1]. They're just killing everyone other than Walmart. Walmart is now unbeatable because they're so big, they can demand wholesale prices that no one else can. If Walmart wants to buy 100M tomatoes from you, you'd sell them barely above cost because otherwise you're stuck with more tomatoes than you could ever sell. To put it another way: you can't compete with these companies because they abuse their market power (either directly or through regulatory capture), not because they're actually that good at anything. 1. https://fourweekmba.com/amazon-vs-walmart/ https://fourweekmba.com/amazon-vs-walmart/
- xyzzy123 3y agoPersonally I think it's both - they execute incredibly well given their scale AND they abuse their market power.
- echelon 3y ago> Personally I think it's both - they execute incredibly well given their scale AND they abuse their market power. They execute well to clear the competitive landscape. Then just well enough to prevent new competition from exploiting a subpar performance gradient. Success grows fat off of easy cash flows instead of staying nimble. That's every major tech company and most big conglomerates.
- bobthepanda 3y agoWalmart also has a hedge in that IIRC its initial expansion was in rural areas neglected by most department store/big box chains. If anything, the dollar stores represent more of a threat to Walmart.
- bombcar 3y agoThe dollar stores around here pose no threat, except maybe in the area of helium balloons. The jump to being a five dollar store that the other one did is doomed to failure.
- HWR_14 3y agoIs there a different product that can not be cloned? Meta produced threads in what, a month? How long would it take your start up to get the users they did by turning it on? The point being, a FAANG can start from zero and beat you to 1 MM users even if they only noticed your product idea once you launched. I would love for that not to be the case, but we see it everywhere. At least for things that are competitive to them.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 8note 3y agoIsn't threads already dead and gone?
- afavour 3y agoI’m not sure it matters much. The point is that they identified a potential area for a competitor to grow in social media and just utterly crushed the space. And now that it turns out maybe there isn’t much of a market it doesn’t even really matter to them, they can easily absorb that loss and move on.
- s1artibartfast 3y agodid they crush it though?
- thereare5lights 3y agono
- mellow-lake-day 3y ago> Meta produced threads in what, a month? It took meta 6 months from starting to work on it to making their public release They are still missing features like a web version so they have been working at for 8 months now and still not "finished"
- baron816 3y agoRight. Amazon couldn’t have beaten Walmart at its own game, so it played a different game and won that instead.
- throw9away6 3y agoThe cloud game is what Amazon has their retail arm is massive but not that profitable
- HDThoreaun 3y agoAmazon retail is profitable. It's just that all the profit is from selling ads so some people don't realize it.
- ljlolel 3y agoActually it played the same game (volume with ultra low margins) but to a different set of users
- lotsofpulp 3y agoIt played the “don’t have to collect sales tax in most states” game until the Supreme Court changed the rules.
- thebears5454 3y agoiPhone share is growing because it is the best phone, and has been for quite some time. Some aspects of androids are better computers, but certain the phone and communication part of them is far far behind.
- nottorp 3y ago> because it is the best phone * least bad. Out of two options.
- steve1977 3y agoWhich, technically, makes it the best.
- veave 3y agoSome people must think that it's impossible to reach iphone levels of stability, design, etc. but the truth is that google is simply incompetent in the same way microsoft was with windows phone.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoIncompetent doesn't quite do it justice. Google doesn't even sell their phones world wide. It's depressing. They're the only phones with hardware security rivaling that of iPhones too. I don't know which's worse: having to buy from Google to use GrapheneOS or the realization that all the other manufacturers are even further behind. With remote attestation there'll be no point in running android anyway. Might as well get an iPhone.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoThat's weird. Is there something about the telephony system in the iPhone that's better? First time I've ever seen anyone praise that. People generally care about the curated walled garden experience.
- thebears5454 3y ago
- SenAnder 3y agoThe iPhone is perhaps the worst example you could have picked. Its many competitors are more interested in pushing lock-screen ads than offering a quality phone.