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I am genuinely confused about something because my realization does not coincide with my previous held beliefs. So I would appreciate if someone else could vali
by wahsd 13y ago
I am genuinely confused about something because my realization does not coincide with my previous held beliefs. So I would appreciate if someone else could validate or make a good argument for why I am wrong.
These companies, especially the biggest ones and the ones that are acquired by them; they all seem to have one thing in common. They are all not at all about what they built, but, once you control for the variables, what you are left with is that it all comes down to users. These acquisitions have zero interest in the "product" as it is rarely unique or even innovative (image filters, "micro"-blogging, task management, etc.); it is all about acquiring the users.
Is there anything that could point to these and most other acquisitions not being solely about the users. I find it hard to believe that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc couldn't build what are, essentially, usually, rather simple technologies.
It seems like it all comes down to the human factor and that changing versus creating new habits is rather difficult and costly, i.e., more than $1 billion dollars costly.
Sorry for the redundancy. I had to throw it together while being interrupted with work. Damn work.
- dangoldin 13y agoUsers by themselves aren't valuable but the ability to monetize them is. Whether it's by selling them products or by showing them advertisements. The bigger companies have better infrastructure in place to be able to monetize users and I think Yahoo just thinks they'll be able to monetize the Tumblr users and recoup their investment that way. It helps that the Tumblr demographic is most likely different from Yahoo's - although that may hurt them when trying to monetize since a different approach may be required. We'll see what happens.
- SatvikBeri 13y agoI think you're spot on. Cloning the technologies is relatively easy. But getting attention is a hard problem. As a general rule, companies rarely[0] win because of superior technology. Rather, they win because they use their tech in a way that provides superior value to their users. This is something all aspiring entrepreneurs should keep in mind. Nobody cares if your company uses incredibly elegant code or highly sophisticated Machine Learning/NLP/Functional Programming/whatever. All users care about is whether your product provides value. And remember that "value" is highly subjective-you may not think that Facebook is useful, but many people will disagree with you. [0]: there are certainly exceptions. If you know that the problem you're solving has major market demand, then you can win with superior execution. Viaweb is a good example, as pg tells it they won mostly because they could roll out features much faster than their competitors.