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Sometimes this is true, but many products are trivial to copy, like Instagram, or twitter. Most of us here could probably copy either of those in a weekend or t
by hnriot 13y ago
Sometimes this is true, but many products are trivial to copy, like Instagram, or twitter. Most of us here could probably copy either of those in a weekend or two.
- ZoF 13y agoCopy basic functionality perhaps.... I doubt the majority here could scale nearly as effectively as both of those companies have....
- mikeash 13y agoI don't know. Scaling as effectively as Twitter doesn't seem like a particularly high bar. They spent a year or so after they got big being down almost as much as they were up. The "fail whale" was just about the most common thing to see on twitter.com. Of course, now that Twitter is established, you cannot repeat their mistakes if you want to succeed.
- ZoF 13y agoRelevant[1] front-page discussion. [1]http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/7/8/the-architecture-twitter-uses-to-deal-with-150m-active-users.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/7/8/the-architecture-tw...
- blueprint 13y agoPlus there's a degree of polish and stability that takes a few months to hit.
- nawitus 13y agoIs there a single example of a service which failed to scale? Once you have user growth, you can get investors to fund scaling regardless of the technology choices made the beginning.
- jot 13y agoThat might be true in the case of the first version of Instagram and Twitter. It was probably far from trivial once they had significant traction. Why do you think no one copied them at the early stage? You'd think that Twitter with all their resources could have copied Instagram in a snap. Instead, when he saw the product and the traction, the founder of Twitter invested in it. He then got upset when Facebook brought them and is only now copying them.
- rythie 13y agoIf they are so easy to copy, why are well all using Instagram and Twitter and not one of the many copies? There's more to a business than the code of its products.