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Comment by arturadib | Hacker News Reader

Although I agree that adding a new feature is not enough to make a product stand out, there is one case where a new feature can mean everything: When the product is designed entirely around it.

Case in point: Posterous. As discussed more extensively by Dustin Curtis (link below), their novel feature was to allow blog posts by email. Any existing blogging platform could have added this feature. But Posterous is different; the product is posting-by-email.

I think something similar can be said about Twitter. Again, any social networking site could have added the option to send short text messages to their already large user base. Facebook in a sense encompassed Twitter with its News Feed.

But again, Twitter is different; short text messages are the product.

http://blog.dustincurtis.com/i-dont-laugh-at-startup-ideas-a...

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Feature X isn't a competitive advantage if it's easily copied. Competitive advantages are things that others cannot attain or cannot attain without great difficulty.

If I could upvote you a hundred times, I would. Almost every comment disagreeing with the article fails to understand the economic definition of "competitive advantage." He didn't say none of those things was an advantage, he said it wasn't a competitive advantage.

I guess you didn't get my point.

If the feature is the product, then the only way someone else can copy your feature is by redesigning their entire product. That's a huge barrier of (re)entry for existing competitors, and hence a competitive advantage.

If you're worried about newcomers, there isn't much you can do to argue for competitive advantage anyway. Most software ideas can easily be copied no matter what.

Except perhaps when the idea targets highly specialized markets and your team already has experts in the topic, and only a few such experts exist in the world. E.g. high-frequency trading platforms, etc.

But in most software startups, that's hardly the case.

"Most software ideas can easily be copied no matter what."

Which is why there is now a gold mine for competitive advantage which is NOT from 'computer science' but IS for projects in 'information technology' implemented in software.

> If the feature is the product, then the only way someone else can copy your feature is by redesigning their entire product. That's a huge barrier of (re)entry for existing competitors...

And my point is this isn't the definition of competitive advantage.

> Most software ideas can easily be copied no matter what.

Which is why most software doesn't have any inherent competitive advantage :)

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