5 ms·

Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg would have heard this advice and been convinced that there was no point in competing with MySpace..

by ekm2 12y ago

rwmj 12y ago
You're saying that MySpace was highly tuned? It was awful. It was a truly terrible experience, even compared to other social network sites (eg. mixi.jp had a far better experience back in 2004). It was obvious to everyone that you could make a better social network than MySpace -- I even suggested it to my co-founder back then.
dredmorbius 12y ago
But he wasn't competing with MySpace. Not when he started The Face Book at Harvard. Nor when he expanded that out over numerous other Ivys and Stanford, then additional selective universities. It wasn't until he'd created an existing, high-quality, attractive userbase, of interest to both advertisers and the general public, that he was competing with MySpace. Sometimes the monopoly is in where you define your market. Amazon took a similar tack, first going after book sales (an excellent market for online commerce), then a broader set of markets.
- rthomas6 12y ago
  It's worth noting that Peter Thiel himself uses these two companies as examples of what he's talking about.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    Where? Not in the linked article. Do you have a reference?
    - rthomas6 12y ago
      http://blakemasters.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-4-notes-essay http://blakemasters.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels-cs183-...
- staunch 12y ago
  Like Thiel, you're attempting to redefine the word competition. Facebook destroyed MySpace by competing with them. They competed by offering a superior service that attracted customers away. Amazon competed with book stores by offering a superior service. They competed by innovating but that doesn't change the fact that they had to compete.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    Facebook also incubated itself for a time in a space that MySpace didn't effectively own or control. See Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism for more on this. "Chang blasts holes in the “World I s Flat” orthodoxy of T homas Friedman and other liberal economists who argue that only unfettered capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty. On the contrary, Chang shows, todays economic superpowers—from the U .S. to Britain to his native Korea—all attained prosperity by shameless protectionism and government intervention in industry." http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9781596915985-8 http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9781596915985-8 Similar principles can be applied in business.
  - notastartup 12y ago
    I think Facebook beat Myspace on a few fronts. One, network effect of high quality groups to attract other groups. Two, spamming user's inbox in an enticing way. Three, clean user interface, although the side bars are cluttered now.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 12y ago
>Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg would have heard this advice and been convinced that there was no point in competing with MySpace.. You probably confuse a market leader of a nascent market with a monopoly. MySpace was popular, but even at its peak it was 1/10 or less of the size of Facebook. Say there's a new product category, for example "pet-rock social sites". The first site PetRockSter on the market gets 1M account. A second site, PetrockSpace arrives, totally obscures the first site, and gets 20M people. Then a third one cames (PetrockBook), and everybody you know starts getting "pet-rock social sites", to the point that half the population or more is now using that third website. Technically the first and second time were "monopolies" in their time. But they only had 100% of a very small niche market, before it matured, that is they had like 100% but of a small percentage of the whole population that would eventually get a social pet rock account. You are only a legit monopoly (with all the power that entails) if a) you have a huge share of a market and b) that market is not blowing up and expanding at a fast rate. E.g the way Microsoft has a near monopoly on desktop OSes.

Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg would have heard this advice and been convinced that there was no point in competing with MySpace..

by ekm2 12y ago

Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg would have heard this advice and been convinced that there was no point in competing with MySpace..

rwmj 12y ago

You're saying that MySpace was highly tuned? It was awful. It was a truly terrible experience, even compared to other social network sites (eg. mixi.jp had a far better experience back in 2004). It was obvious to everyone that you could make a better social network than MySpace -- I even suggested it to my co-founder back then.

dredmorbius 12y ago

But he wasn't competing with MySpace. Not when he started The Face Book at Harvard. Nor when he expanded that out over numerous other Ivys and Stanford, then additional selective universities. It wasn't until he'd created an existing, high-quality, attractive userbase, of interest to both advertisers and the general public, that he was competing with MySpace. Sometimes the monopoly is in where you define your market. Amazon took a similar tack, first going after book sales (an excellent market for online commerce), then a broader set of markets.

rthomas6 12y ago
It's worth noting that Peter Thiel himself uses these two companies as examples of what he's talking about.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Where? Not in the linked article. Do you have a reference?
  - rthomas6 12y ago
    http://blakemasters.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-4-notes-essay http://blakemasters.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels-cs183-...
staunch 12y ago
Like Thiel, you're attempting to redefine the word competition. Facebook destroyed MySpace by competing with them. They competed by offering a superior service that attracted customers away. Amazon competed with book stores by offering a superior service. They competed by innovating but that doesn't change the fact that they had to compete.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Facebook also incubated itself for a time in a space that MySpace didn't effectively own or control. See Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism for more on this. "Chang blasts holes in the “World I s Flat” orthodoxy of T homas Friedman and other liberal economists who argue that only unfettered capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty. On the contrary, Chang shows, todays economic superpowers—from the U .S. to Britain to his native Korea—all attained prosperity by shameless protectionism and government intervention in industry." http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9781596915985-8 http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9781596915985-8 Similar principles can be applied in business.
- notastartup 12y ago
  I think Facebook beat Myspace on a few fronts. One, network effect of high quality groups to attract other groups. Two, spamming user's inbox in an enticing way. Three, clean user interface, although the side bars are cluttered now.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

coldtea 12y ago

>Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg would have heard this advice and been convinced that there was no point in competing with MySpace.. You probably confuse a market leader of a nascent market with a monopoly. MySpace was popular, but even at its peak it was 1/10 or less of the size of Facebook. Say there's a new product category, for example "pet-rock social sites". The first site PetRockSter on the market gets 1M account. A second site, PetrockSpace arrives, totally obscures the first site, and gets 20M people. Then a third one cames (PetrockBook), and everybody you know starts getting "pet-rock social sites", to the point that half the population or more is now using that third website. Technically the first and second time were "monopolies" in their time. But they only had 100% of a very small niche market, before it matured, that is they had like 100% but of a small percentage of the whole population that would eventually get a social pet rock account. You are only a legit monopoly (with all the power that entails) if a) you have a huge share of a market and b) that market is not blowing up and expanding at a fast rate. E.g the way Microsoft has a near monopoly on desktop OSes.