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Maybe this could have been Posterous had they won that battle with Tumblr. Posterous had the superior product early on, but for some reason it never caught on.
by btipling 13y ago
Maybe this could have been Posterous had they won that battle with Tumblr. Posterous had the superior product early on, but for some reason it never caught on. I wonder how that works, who wins for what reasons. It does not seem to be for product or technology reasons as I think Posterous had Tumblr beat. It's almost luck and magic who picks up the right kind of early users that lead to success. Admittedly it did seem like a bit of an uphill struggle since Tumblr got started a little earlier? Maybe that's it. Tumblr and Posterous were a new kind of microblog platform a couple of years ago, now Tumblr is massive and Posterious is dead.
Another thing that seems interesting to me is that whenever someone exits into an acquisition it's like this space becomes open again for new startups. Someone should make a new microblogging platform that now disrups Tumblr/Yahoo. It's kind of like the dragon Ouroboros, eating its own tail, around here sometimes.
- Swizec 13y agoPorn. Tumblr has porn. As always, when two technologies are battling, the one porn picks will win.
- freehunter 13y agoExcept HD-DVD. In that battle, it was the one who had a video game console backing the standard versus the one with porn but a console maker only paying lip service to the technology.
- durin42 13y agoThe way I remember it, Sony refused to let the porn industry print bluray discs, and the HD-DVD backers just didn't care, but bluray started winning as soon as Sony relented.
- wmf 13y agoHadn't porn already moved on to the Internet by the time Blu-ray/HD-DVD were released?
- ssharp 13y agoBluRay won in terms of it stuck around, while HD-DVD died off, but I don't think BR has overtaken DVD's the way DVD's overtook VHS. For the longer game (which is probably only another half-decade), I'd argue that streaming/OnDemand is the real winner. If that's the case, then porn helped shape the winner yet again.
- gadders 13y agoHow is that going to play out with 3d printers?
- fosap 13y agoVery NSFW: http://www.reddit.com/r/cummingonfigurines/ http://www.reddit.com/r/cummingonfigurines/
- benjamincburns 13y agoThat's a strange and interesting theory. I can think of a few anecdotal places where this is the case, but I wonder if anyone has done a study of porn as a predictor of platform success/failure... Edit: Just thinking about the business of porn, this is probably a decent heuristic for simplicity and cost effectiveness. Porn is usually very low budget (compared to other mass market media), with a very high volume of consumers. From my experience in non-profit oceanographic research, nothing focuses an engineering effort like trying to succeed on a shoestring budget (wow, I never thought that'd compare to working in the porn industry).
- arctangent 13y agoI think this might be what you are looking for: http://history.tamu.edu/faculty/coopersmith/coopersmith%20personal/pornography%20technology%20and%20progress.pdf http://history.tamu.edu/faculty/coopersmith/coopersmith%20pe...
- paganel 13y ago> but I wonder if anyone has done a study of porn as a predictor of platform success/failure... For better or worse, FB could be a good example of "platform success" that partially relies on that. It's not porn per se, just beach/bikini photos of one's lady-friends, or his work-mates, or the wife's friends.
- frozenport 13y agoPerhaps, but what do think of the JCPenny catalog?
- wcfields 13y agoProves the point: No JCPenney Catalog, profits falling, oust the new CEO.
- ssupra 13y ago*female friends fixed that for you
- 13y ago
- swang 13y agoDidn't porn pick HD-DVD to win?
- sib 13y agoThat's right. For example, Betamax (technically superior) was not licensed to porn studios, while VHS was. See also, American Express would not enable "gentlemen's clubs," whereas MasterCard did, which is one of the ways MC broke into the market.
- josh2600 13y agoCounter example: HD DVD was selected as the format of choice for next generation porn media. Didn't turn out so well. I think tumblr was easier for people to post stupid pictures of cats and porn. The friction to entry was lower IMHO.
- VonGuard 13y agoI think the HD DVD/ Bluray era hasn't seen porn on those formats for two reason: 1. it doesn't matter anymore because the Internet has infinite porn. 2. No one wants to see their porn in HD, as it makes the whole thing kinda grosser. A bit like how Cameron Diaz looks great in low def, but has a crater face in HD.
- josh2600 13y agohttp://www.macworld.com/article/1050627/pornhd.html http://www.macworld.com/article/1050627/pornhd.html No, porn definitely was going to be on HD DVD, it just lost the war.
- majani 13y agoCounterpoint: YouTube vs Dailymotion
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoWell, that, and teenagers posting stuff about their hobbies. Doesn't even need to be the cool kids anymore. If you can amass enough content from the nerds to get them networking with each other and then make some money off it, it works. Of course, the issue with Tumblr is the make some money off it part, but Yahoo is from the '90s, so they know not to expect to make money off things.
- citricsquid 13y agoTumblr is not a blogging platform, it is a social network. Tumblr revolves around the dashboard, it's much more Twitter than it is Wordpress.
- MojoJolo 13y agoI think it can be both. I'm using Tumblr as a blogging platform than a social network. I spend more time writing content than looking the posts of other. I migrated from Blogger to Tumblr coz I feel that blogging is easier there.
- wilfra 13y agoIt is definitely both. Tumblr replaced WP for me. I have 12 blogs on Tumblr (and counting), almost all of which I post to frequently - and the only thing I ever use the dashboard for is to make those posts. The only social action I have ever taken was to reblog a recent post I found on reddit, mostly just to see what would happen.
- pavs 13y agoI had the exact opposite opinion about posterous. I thought it was mainly built on hype and was quite popular inside eco chambers like HN community. There was very little if any user fueled, word-of-mouth growth. Also had had very little traffic when you compare it to tumblr.
- marckremers 13y agoDisagree, Tumblr won because it of it's underlying attitude and commitment to creativity. Posterous never had that edge to it. I engaged with both platforms, and Tumblr, quite simply, felt cooler and fresher.
- Mahn 13y agoThere's always a bit of luck involved in these things that escapes reason. I seem to recall that at some point the landing page of Posterous was considerably more cluttered than the LP of Tumblr, and that kinda gave me the impression Tumblr was the simpler product, but I never really used either of them.
- nh 13y agoI think luck was a big part of it. Plus, Tumblr is a really cool name (compared to Posterous ), it's catchy, unique, and 'hip'.
- progrock 13y agoI was going to suggest it could have been something as simple as a name. Posterous is a proposterous name. It's horrible. Tumblr is an equally shitty Web2.0 crap name, in the same vain as the ghastly i prefix. iYahoor!
- adventured 13y agoThe critical question to be asked in response to your premise is: the superior product for what? Tumblr had a vastly superior product for the market it has been focused on.
- swalkergibson 13y agoThe Window and the Mirror As part of our research, we interviewed Alan L. Wurtzel, the Level 5 leader responsible for turning Circuit City from a ramshackle company on the edge of bankruptcy into one of America's most successful electronics retailers. In the 15 years after its transition date in 1982, Circuit City outperformed the market 18.5:1. We asked Wurtzel to list the top five factors in his company's transformation, ranked by importance. His number one factor? Luck. "We were in a great industry, with the wind at our backs." But wait a minute, we retorted, Silo -- your comparison company -- was in the same industry, with the same wind, and bigger sails. The conversation went back and forth, with Wurtzel refusing to take much credit for the transition, preferring to attribute it largely to just being in the right place at the right time. Later, when we asked him to discuss the factors that would sustain a good-to-great transformation, he said, "The first thing that comes to mind is luck. I was lucky to find the right successor." Luck. What an odd factor to talk about. Yet the Level 5 leaders we identified invoked it frequently. We asked an executive at steel company Nucor why it had such a remarkable track record of making good decisions. His response? "I guess we were just lucky." Joseph F. Cullman III, the Level 5 CEO of Philip Morris, flat out refused to take credit for his company's success, citing his good fortune to have great colleagues, successors, and predecessors. Even the book he wrote about his career -- which he penned at the urging of his colleagues and which he never intended to distribute widely outside the company -- had the unusual title I'm a Lucky Guy. At first, we were puzzled by the Level 5 leaders' emphasis on good luck. After all, there is no evidence that the companies that had progressed from good to great were blessed with more good luck (or more bad luck, for that matter) than the comparison companies. But then we began to notice an interesting pattern in the executives at the comparison companies: they often blamed their situations on bad luck, bemoaning the difficulties of the environment they faced. Compare Bethlehem Steel and Nucor, for example. Both steel companies operated with products that are hard to differentiate, and both faced a competitive challenge from cheap imported steel. Both companies paid significantly higher wages than most of their foreign competitors. And yet executives at the two companies held completely different views of the same environment. Bethlehem Steel's CEO summed up the company's problems in 1983 by blaming the imports: "Our first, second, and third problems are imports." Meanwhile, Ken Iverson and his crew at Nucor saw the imports as a blessing: "Aren't we lucky; steel is heavy, and they have to ship it all the way across the ocean, giving us a huge advantage." Indeed, Iverson saw the first, second, and third problems facing the U.S. steel industry not in imports but in management. He even went so far as to speak out publicly against government protection against imports, telling a gathering of stunned steel executives in 1977 that the real problems facing the industry lay in the fact that management had failedto keep pace with technology. The emphasis on luck turns out to be part of a broader pattern that we came to call the window and the mirror. Level 5 leaders, inherently humble, look out the window to apportion credit -- even undue credit -- to factors outside themselves. If they can't find a specific person or event to give credit to, they credit good luck. At the same time, they look in the mirror to assign responsibility, never citing bad luck or external factors when things go poorly. Conversely, the comparison executives frequently looked out the window for factors to blame but preened in the mirror to credit themselves when things went well. The funny thing about the window-and-mirror concept is that it does not reflect reality. According to our research, the Level 5 leaders were responsible for their companies' transformations. But they would never admit that. We can't climb inside their heads and assess whether they deeply believed what they saw in the window and the mirror. But it doesn't really matter, because they acted as if they believed it, and they acted with such consistency that it produced exceptional results. -- Good to Great, Jim Collins, 2001
- tlogan 13y agoI think there are tree reasons: - Tumblr is easier for photoblogging - Tumblr has a social network - Tumblr somehow encouraged (or at least did not care) about NSFW
- mikeleeorg 13y agoI suspect Tumblr beat out Posterous because of its community features. By showing a feed of new posts, a la Twitter, it aided the discoverability of content. And there's nothing to spur on a community like the addiction of getting likes, notes, and reblogs from other people.