5 ms·

Do people remember 1999? 24% of people in the developed world and 5% worldwide had internet access. No one had mobile broadband (remember WAP?), and wired broad

by toby 12y ago

Do people remember 1999? 24% of people in the developed world and 5% worldwide had internet access. No one had mobile broadband (remember WAP?), and wired broadband was just starting. Virtually none of the public .com companies made a profit. However, the NASDAQ was basically where it is now. Many people I knew were getting multiple job offers with incentives like a Boxster S or a 4-day workweek thrown in. We may or may not be in a bubble now, but the excessiveness of that time really felt like a different level to me.

nostrademons 12y ago
Yeah, I remember thinking in 1999 that the Internet was going to be huge, but it wasn't going to be huge yet, and there would be a helluva reckoning for dot-com investors when the inflated expectations didn't pan out. With this bubble, I'm bearish not because I don't think that the general investment thesis of tech disrupting existing markets is wrong, but because I don't think these particular companies will be the ones left standing when the dust settles. Basically, I'm betting that technological progress will be more dramatic than we expect, and that these are early market leaders that will then fade away into obscurity as future technology changes the assumptions they're built upon. Uber and Lyft, for example, are dead as soon as self-driving cars become viable. DropBox is vulnerable to the end of the file; in recent devices, the filesystem is quite hidden and peoples' workflows just don't involve creating files, they involve inputting information in some specialized cloud service provider. AirBnB may end up being eaten by itself: as it becomes more viable economically, you'll see more purpose-built construction being built to be listed straight on AirBnB, and at some point it becomes worth it to ignore the consumer sellers entirely and just act as a broker between commercial property owners and travelers.
- adamlett 12y ago
  It's not difficult to predict the future with 100% accuracy if you don't have to provide a deadline for your predictions. Every product or service will eventually become obsolete, but the question is when? Will Uber make enough money for its investors to make the investements worthwile, before its service becomes obsolete by self driving vehicles? Will DropBox find an alternative business model before the "end of file" occurs?
- function_seven 12y ago
  > Uber and Lyft, for example, are dead as soon as self-driving cars become viable True, if they're not nimble enough to adapt. But think about that statement applied to Netflix 10 years ago. "Netflix is dead as soon as video streaming becomes viable" (i.e. They were a DVD rental business). I could see Uber and Lyft adding a fleet of self-driving cars for people to call on-demand. Or even closer to their current model: maybe they sign up owners of those cards to sublet them in the middle of the day while they're at the office. I don't think most of us—me included—can fully appreciate the massive shift that will come if and when cars are fully autonomous, driving about with no occupants.
- jaredsohn 12y ago
  >Uber and Lyft, for example, are dead as soon as self-driving cars become viable. Wouldn't they just replace drivers with self-driving cars but maintain the rest of their infrastructure? It has already been announced that Uber is working to develop automatic cars. http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/03/technology/innovationnation/uber-self-driving-cars/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/03/technology/innovationnation/...
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    It changes the value chain in ways that destroy their competitive position. Short term, it's pretty likely that they'll adapt. Long term, they're dead. A good example is the IBM PC. When it came out, everyone was saying "Of course, IBM will now dominate the new personal computer market, because they have the sales & marketing apparatus to reach into every business that will want to buy one. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, after all, and now that they own the technology to make a personal computer, their offering is clearly superior." But that's not what happened. Instead, they did dominate the PC market - for approximately 5 years. But the PC had reduced prices so that it was now targeting a market that was cost-sensitive, and it had created a secondary market of applications that let it reach into many areas that had previously required custom software direct from the manufacturer. IBM did not own the critical matchmaking components of this, the instruction set, operating system, and BIOS. Intel and Microsoft did, and then Compaq reverse-engineered the BIOS. As a result, clones flooded in, IBM's sales & marketing prowess counted for nothing, and they found their market commoditized. Uber's critical value proposition is serving as a market-maker in a two-sided market. That's the part that's really difficult for a startup to clone. You can make the Uber ride-sharing software trivially, and many people have [1]. But even if you do, riders won't use your service because you don't have the same number of drivers available that Uber does, and drivers won't join because they won't make as much in fares. When self-driving cars come out, that two-sided marketplace becomes a one-sided marketplace. We've yet to see how Google will market the technology, but the most strategically advantageous approach for them is to contract out manufacture of the cars, own the hardware, put their own software on it (and not license it out), and then sell a service to riders, undercutting Ubers' prices. Under this model, Uber's competitive advantage counts for nothing - their supply chain costs more than the competition, in a price-sensitive one-sided market. Google could then use a number of different tactics to lock Uber out. The most likely one is regulatory; in the interest of public safety, they could argue that all self-driving cars need to pass a very stringent safety test, consisting of real-world driving for X00,000 miles. Google's got a 10-year head start on Uber for developing this software, and once a critical mass of cars on the road are Google self-drivers, they have accurate position information on everybody else, a key factor in making this safer. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/homeless-coders-trees-for-cars-app-2013-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/homeless-coders-trees-for-car...
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Uber and Lyft, for example, are dead as soon as self-driving cars become viable. As I see it, Uber and Lyft have built systems that would be very useful for managing a fleet of self-driving cars to provide on-demand service, and one or both of them are likely to either buy such fleets, adapt their services slightly to be the middleman between such fleets and consumers, or be purchased at a premium price by the operators of such fleets once self-driving cars are viable. Now, sure, driving for Uber and Lyft as a profit-making job is dead fairly quickly once self-driving cars become viable, but that doesn't mean Uber or Lyft is. > AirBnB may end up being eaten by itself: as it becomes more viable economically, you'll see more purpose-built construction being built to be listed straight on AirBnB, and at some point it becomes worth it to ignore the consumer sellers entirely and just act as a broker between commercial property owners and travelers. Again, that's not really a great threat to AirBnB in the absence of someone else whose built just as strong a relation with travelers and also has better connections with commercial property owners. But, most likely the transition of the suppliers offering via AirBnB from casual to commercial will be gradual -- and its already been happening from day one -- and AirBnB, as long as it maintains an advantage as the traveler destination, will be ideally positioned to continue that dominance as the property "sharing" market is less consumer sharing and more commercial rentals that are outsourcing much of the traveler-facing side of operations (and exploiting whatever rules are adopted for "property sharing" distinct from hotel operation.)

by toby 12y ago

nostrademons 12y ago

Yeah, I remember thinking in 1999 that the Internet was going to be huge, but it wasn't going to be huge yet, and there would be a helluva reckoning for dot-com investors when the inflated expectations didn't pan out. With this bubble, I'm bearish not because I don't think that the general investment thesis of tech disrupting existing markets is wrong, but because I don't think these particular companies will be the ones left standing when the dust settles. Basically, I'm betting that technological progress will be more dramatic than we expect, and that these are early market leaders that will then fade away into obscurity as future technology changes the assumptions they're built upon. Uber and Lyft, for example, are dead as soon as self-driving cars become viable. DropBox is vulnerable to the end of the file; in recent devices, the filesystem is quite hidden and peoples' workflows just don't involve creating files, they involve inputting information in some specialized cloud service provider. AirBnB may end up being eaten by itself: as it becomes more viable economically, you'll see more purpose-built construction being built to be listed straight on AirBnB, and at some point it becomes worth it to ignore the consumer sellers entirely and just act as a broker between commercial property owners and travelers.

adamlett 12y ago
It's not difficult to predict the future with 100% accuracy if you don't have to provide a deadline for your predictions. Every product or service will eventually become obsolete, but the question is when? Will Uber make enough money for its investors to make the investements worthwile, before its service becomes obsolete by self driving vehicles? Will DropBox find an alternative business model before the "end of file" occurs?
function_seven 12y ago
> Uber and Lyft, for example, are dead as soon as self-driving cars become viable True, if they're not nimble enough to adapt. But think about that statement applied to Netflix 10 years ago. "Netflix is dead as soon as video streaming becomes viable" (i.e. They were a DVD rental business). I could see Uber and Lyft adding a fleet of self-driving cars for people to call on-demand. Or even closer to their current model: maybe they sign up owners of those cards to sublet them in the middle of the day while they're at the office. I don't think most of us—me included—can fully appreciate the massive shift that will come if and when cars are fully autonomous, driving about with no occupants.
jaredsohn 12y ago
>Uber and Lyft, for example, are dead as soon as self-driving cars become viable. Wouldn't they just replace drivers with self-driving cars but maintain the rest of their infrastructure? It has already been announced that Uber is working to develop automatic cars. http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/03/technology/innovationnation/uber-self-driving-cars/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/03/technology/innovationnation/...
- nostrademons 12y ago
  It changes the value chain in ways that destroy their competitive position. Short term, it's pretty likely that they'll adapt. Long term, they're dead. A good example is the IBM PC. When it came out, everyone was saying "Of course, IBM will now dominate the new personal computer market, because they have the sales & marketing apparatus to reach into every business that will want to buy one. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, after all, and now that they own the technology to make a personal computer, their offering is clearly superior." But that's not what happened. Instead, they did dominate the PC market - for approximately 5 years. But the PC had reduced prices so that it was now targeting a market that was cost-sensitive, and it had created a secondary market of applications that let it reach into many areas that had previously required custom software direct from the manufacturer. IBM did not own the critical matchmaking components of this, the instruction set, operating system, and BIOS. Intel and Microsoft did, and then Compaq reverse-engineered the BIOS. As a result, clones flooded in, IBM's sales & marketing prowess counted for nothing, and they found their market commoditized. Uber's critical value proposition is serving as a market-maker in a two-sided market. That's the part that's really difficult for a startup to clone. You can make the Uber ride-sharing software trivially, and many people have [1]. But even if you do, riders won't use your service because you don't have the same number of drivers available that Uber does, and drivers won't join because they won't make as much in fares. When self-driving cars come out, that two-sided marketplace becomes a one-sided marketplace. We've yet to see how Google will market the technology, but the most strategically advantageous approach for them is to contract out manufacture of the cars, own the hardware, put their own software on it (and not license it out), and then sell a service to riders, undercutting Ubers' prices. Under this model, Uber's competitive advantage counts for nothing - their supply chain costs more than the competition, in a price-sensitive one-sided market. Google could then use a number of different tactics to lock Uber out. The most likely one is regulatory; in the interest of public safety, they could argue that all self-driving cars need to pass a very stringent safety test, consisting of real-world driving for X00,000 miles. Google's got a 10-year head start on Uber for developing this software, and once a critical mass of cars on the road are Google self-drivers, they have accurate position information on everybody else, a key factor in making this safer. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/homeless-coders-trees-for-cars-app-2013-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/homeless-coders-trees-for-car...
dragonwriter 12y ago
> Uber and Lyft, for example, are dead as soon as self-driving cars become viable. As I see it, Uber and Lyft have built systems that would be very useful for managing a fleet of self-driving cars to provide on-demand service, and one or both of them are likely to either buy such fleets, adapt their services slightly to be the middleman between such fleets and consumers, or be purchased at a premium price by the operators of such fleets once self-driving cars are viable. Now, sure, driving for Uber and Lyft as a profit-making job is dead fairly quickly once self-driving cars become viable, but that doesn't mean Uber or Lyft is. > AirBnB may end up being eaten by itself: as it becomes more viable economically, you'll see more purpose-built construction being built to be listed straight on AirBnB, and at some point it becomes worth it to ignore the consumer sellers entirely and just act as a broker between commercial property owners and travelers. Again, that's not really a great threat to AirBnB in the absence of someone else whose built just as strong a relation with travelers and also has better connections with commercial property owners. But, most likely the transition of the suppliers offering via AirBnB from casual to commercial will be gradual -- and its already been happening from day one -- and AirBnB, as long as it maintains an advantage as the traveler destination, will be ideally positioned to continue that dominance as the property "sharing" market is less consumer sharing and more commercial rentals that are outsourcing much of the traveler-facing side of operations (and exploiting whatever rules are adopted for "property sharing" distinct from hotel operation.)