Americans are so Narrow Minded - a GDC report
glgroup.com
glgroup.com
Smaller untapped opportunities are only small until they gain traction. There is no end to browser based games right now.
Facebook started small, Twitter started small in fact most companies start small.
The difference is just as likely that European companies haven't understood the power of using large ecosystems to leverage their own business. Instead they are puritans who want to create their own companies.
When ecosystems like ebay, FaceBook and Twitter appear why shouldn't people take advantage of that?
Business opportunity is business opportunity. It is very few peoples luxury to create something truly unique and in that game Europeans aren't really making any dent's in the universe.
There are millions of opportunities that will never make you fuck-you money, but will afford you a decent living. They are often less risky because there's less competition. Patio11's Bingocardcreator is an example. No matter how much traction it gets it'll never be the new facebook. Europeans seem to be happier with these kind of opportunities, while Americans go for the homeruns.
Maybe some Americans try for the homerun and no Europeans do (I can't judge), but even in America by company-count, which I accept as a reasonable proxy of number-of-people-starting-companies, the "home runs" attempters are the outliers. And of course the VCs are interested in the home runs, that's the VC business model!
EDIT: (Disclosure: I am an European exposed to the SV culture :)
While there are plenty of opportunities to fill a niche, you won't receive broad support without the blessing of the few gatekeepers.
A very silly article indeed.
Is this not true for the rest of the world? All industries are prone to fads. Just because the guys in the US - where, arguably, the action is - are caught up in this fad does not necessarily make them narrow minded. It makes no sense to extrapolate this to all Americans.
(Note: am neither American nor European.)
There are morons and fantastic people in the US, just like Europe and everywhere else.
It borderline absurd to talk about American vs. Europeans unless you are talking statistics and even there is problematic.
Another personal story: I have fairly small feet, where by small I mean 39-40 in European size, which by no means is abnormally small. Finding shoes for me is a frustrating exercise because most stores don't carry sizes that small. And the thing is that every store stops at the same size, so if you don't find it in the first store it's highly unlikely that going to ten more stores will help.
It seems to me that what the article is describing is exactly what happens: everyone rushes to the largest market with the largest potential and, while in theory there should be someone establishing themselves in the smaller markets, when deciding whether they want to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond, they go with the latter.
It's like when you get to a fraction of the total market (defined in some way) and it's below 5% or something, it's not like only 5% of the actors in the market will offer something for you. Everyone makes the same decision so the selection quickly drops to zero.
Thing came out longer than I expected, sorry for rambling.
I can get most of what I want in my city, but then that's one of the reasons I've chosen to live in a big city.
Of course, the main place your argument falls down is that the items you describe are in fact available. Perhaps not in the channel you want, but they're available.
So where exactly is capitalism failing you?
What I said was that the fanboys claim that the free market will utilize every opportunity of profit, and I'm claiming that's not borne out by experience.
Strawman. The claim is that folks will try to find profitable things. That doesn't imply that they'll tolerate, let alone prefer less profitable things. (It also doesn't imply that everything profitable has been found.)
If you think that there's good money to be made on breadboards in Boston, go for it.
What? Your beef is that someone else isn't catering to something that you don't value enough for them to make money? If you don't think that breadboards are worth much, why should anyone else?
No, the fanboys don't say that. The "fanboys" say what arethuza said.
Fanboys might also say something along the lines of "If you're so sure there's a profit opportunity here, why not try it and capture it?" Now, I'm actually not seriously suggesting that you do that, but I am seriously suggesting that if you were to try it, you may discover that there are indeed good reasons they don't have them. I've seen any number of "boutique" stores start up under your philosophy, and from what I've seen it's a very, very dangerous mindset to start up a business in.
I think the real reason people don't like capitalism is that it tends to let the cold, hard underlying reality actually impact your business, and force you to adapt to the world instead of the other way around. (And when I see companies do that in a putatively "capitalistic" environment, I'm the first to say that it's no longer capitalism.) A lot of people have a deep resistance to that idea, but I think it's at the core of why capitalism succeeds so well; the success of your system will be pretty directly proportionate to its ability to deal with reality and not fantasy, and some non-capitalistic systems can at least survive... though, well, let's talk about that again after the entitlements (aka "the fantasy that I can be promised unconditionally safe money in the future by the government today"; there is no such thing as unconditionally safe future money) are done crashing. (Yes, the US has entitlements; to that extent it isn't very capitalistic.)
Everyone in a free market tends to try and maximize there own profits - which isn't the same thing as "utilize every opportunity of profit".