Amazon, Facebook and Google can all be beaten
medium.com
medium.com
If you look at the mission statement for their search team it is now something like "answer your questions" - which is great 90% of the time, but what no longer exists (with most people not realizing) is a good general search engine for the WEB, meaning the collection of websites out there.
There is no longer a sense of serendipity or of finding a cool new website, and maybe finding web pages on the web is just a nostagic thing with no real benefit, but there's no doubt that Google has moved away from that as real objective. The reality is that the web has become overwhelmed by listicles and minimum pages that go one inch past Google's definition of spam, but otherwise muck up the web. It would be amazing for a search engine to sift past all that cruft and low-effort material to find actually interesting and unique content.
In a way, simply by not being Google is already an advantage because everyone is catering to Google. If you use a different standard you can easily get different results - it's just a matter if those would be useful for anyone? Everyone mostly wants to see the "right" answer and Google has conditioned us to expect it.
site:<reddit/ycombinator/stackoverflow/tripadvisor/random niche forum.com> "something someone interested in the same question/topic would say"
.. all in an attempt to filter over-commercialized bullshit. There's an opportunity here for a startup to capture an audience hungry for real information and leverage them into becoming the next hub for over-commercialized bullshit.
If you're searching for a real human's thoughts on a particular mountain bike for one example, it will be nothing but product pages. Add in the word Reviews and you get the productized review sites. Even searching for "Best trails in {my area}" gives me an ecommerce site's blog laden with product links and not-so-subtle sells.
Want to read a discussion about a book? Google will only show you product pages with review sections on the first page, on the next page the search results have already devolved into unrelated nonsense or spin sites.
It's hard to find the humans on the internet through all the commercial pages. I can't blame Google entirely of course, they are helped by the SEO industry's incessant bombardment in the 2010ish era that filled the web with so much pointless crap, and the ongoing efforts of e-commerce stores with deep pockets to be the only heard voice for particular subjects.
Reddit is a pretty good source of quality reviews for products ranging from niche (mechanical keyboards) to mainstream (MacBooks).
If you read a newspaper, you clearly know when someone is trying to sell you something, but on Google search, you don't. I don't mind being marketed to, but I would like to know when I'm marketed to, and the vast majority of google results are organic search marketing.
DDG: 1. WebMD 2. Walmart 3. examine.com 4. Wikipedia 5. Amazon 6. some site apparently dedicated to r.k. 7. livescience.com 8. some webshop 9. HuffPo with the clickbait title you mentioned 10. Some kind of webmd clone
Google: 1. WebMD 2. healthline.com 3. examine.com 4. Dr. Axe (no idea what this is but doesn't seem to be purely spam) 5. livescience.com 6. Wikipedia 7. HuffPo clickbait 8. Some kind of webshop 9-10. Amazon
I wouldn't say it all spam, though there are questionable sites in top 10, but there are also a number of legit ones.
I note though "rasberry ketones" is not a correct spelling, it should be "raspberry". Maybe that's the reason you've got bad results?
That's really a shame (and an opportunity for someone else).
+ nice: open books (deeplearningbook.org)
+ not nice: online seminars (udemy, udacity, edx)
+ not nice: wikipedia copycats (investopedia)
+ not nice: SEO optimized business analytics sites recognizable by their top 10 this, top 20 that (kdnuggets)
+ not nice: commercial software (mathworks)
+ not nice: big companies hitchhiking on buzzwords (sas)
What would be nice are websites and people that are often linked from HN. For example http://www.inference.vc rather than sas. Or https://distill.pub/ rather than investopedia. Or https://www.tensorflow.org rather than mathworks. If good sites are showing up in the top results more often, there will also be more incentive to keep up the good work as well.
It's an easy distinction to make for a human, I'm sure Google's omniscient AI can easily be trained to make that distinction. And it would also work in Google's favor, at least with respect to users who do not have ad blockers - if (as a general rule or thanks to explicit user choice) "commercial pages" are demoted, the google ads become more valuable.
these are all hidden from most search results and consumers are now forced to settle for SEO optimized trash results, rather than discussions
what if human judgement was better than the AI powering the results indexing, for particular keywords that don't seem to be machine learned well enough
No, because you don't show them to us.
I have abandoned other Google services as well now. Firefox is now my preferred browser for development. Apple Maps is good for navigation. Gmail I still use, as one notch above mailinator: it's my dumping ground for unwelcome mandatory site signup. All the mail I want to receive is on Fastmail. Microsoft's office software is vastly better than G Suite. And so on.
I trust Google as much as I trust Facebook or any other advertising network: not at all, and I welcome and adopt alternatives.
I've had a 't' custom search engine address bar hotkey for Twitter for years.
Edit: makes me wonder if the web is evolving in the direction of more social/curated search, less global search
how to avoid that ?
e.g specific sites for any particular demands, or any other tricks
One thing to note when using filetype in bing by specifying xls it also catches other file extensions (xlsx) while google in my experience only would find xls.
Yes I use bing sometimes and especially when troubleshooting Linux error logs I find it parses a copy paste better. Just my experience. Important to note I do not use profiles.
That's why I keep ddg.gg as my default search engine. Ctrl-K, and type:
!r "something"
!hn "something"
!so "something"
!ta "something"
And for some niche sites I submitted "bang" suggestions which were accepted.
Works great for technical search, e.g. !cppr for C++ reference.
In a rare case I need Google, I just add !g to my search.
Websearch has passed over the great divide and is now a utility. "Beating" Google in search is only half of it...without the advertising business, you can't survive long enough to show off your tech. Without the 80% mobile platform, you don't have a way of putting it in front of people when they need answers right away.
Of course this all assumes you can ACTUALLY build a better search...doubtful, Google may be evil but the search is still giving people what they want
Accept that 1998 is gone and that window has closed
Inflection points are when giants get mauled. New houses with new windows get built, old windows don't get re-opened.
Amazon's echo and or whatever is coming next in AI is the biggest threat Google has ever faced. They've moved past the stage of being nimble, it'll take everything they've got to not get buried (at worst) or stagnated (most likely) in the shift. AI will fracture (is fracturing) and distribute search as a concept all over the place, constantly stealing microshare from the traditional search bar / page with every thing that has AI in it that people interact with. Google knows this, it makes them very desperate, they're still young enough to be very paranoid (the same reason they knew to go get Android, the iPhone caused a new inflection).
But Google works very well. Competitors like Bing, Duckduckgo, Qwant, etc. are really bad by comparison -- and I don't know what I would do better even if I had infinite ressources.
Search on a specific site is likewise much better on Google than on said site; if you want to find a family of products on Amazon it's much more efficient to search for it via Google images with site:amazon.com; same for Alibaba, etc. And those are companies that one imagines has the ressources to build good in-house search. Yet they don't, or can't.
Or put another way: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=google+ad+revenue
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...
(Brought to you by Google Search: so ubiquitous it has become it's own meme.)
IBM survived two world wars.
Products come and go, and no single company will own all profit streams.
No.
A) doing websearch well is expensive
B) doing websearch well consistently over time is very hard -- if you remember when Google started, about every 6 to 9 months a cool new websearch would come out, and 5 months later would be garbage. Google managed to buck that trend, mostly (it still goes through cycles of crap results)
C) even if you have the money to do it right, and consistently do it right, you have an uphill battle of market perception. Users will perceive Google results as better than yours, as long as they're marked as coming from google: even if the Google results are perceived as worse when compared to yours without branding.
I think filtering out crap, without filtering out the long tail of esoteric content sites would be key to getting better results. But you have to be prepared to play a long game on marketing and user acquisition.
- You can't just take incumbents out of the market at will, there are some external conditions that must be right;
- Not every niche is the same, you must get the correct one;
- That is a completely inverted way to think about the problem. You first innovate (or lay plans to do so), then you start looking for niches your innovation fits.
If somebody really wants to try to apply "The Innovator's Dilemma" disruption onto Google, it's not a bad idea to look at posts asking "and how do you expect to monetize this?" on this thread, and try to answer that question.
I've been working on a sort of "social network for links" for that exact purpose: I personally love finding cool new websites and links, and I just don't see that happening with modern search engines.
So I made Float[1]. I like to think of it this way: if Google is for search, then Float is for exploring.
Still pretty early but core features are here...let me know what you think!
[1] https://float.am
Is web search still the main problem, now so much content has moved off the web and into apps and walled gardens? Could the big challenge for Google be a startup that somehow solves the problem of searching all of that content (assuming that is a problem which can be solved)?
I can't think of an example where people en masse have stopped using something useful to replace it with something that provides "no real benefit".
Also, technology has spread all around, so you can have your own indexing/search ..
As opposed to a search engine that helps you find exactly what you're looking for, I see as wiby as more of a "serendipity engine" that helps you find what you weren't looking for.
The best tool to suggest things that interest, that you need or want without collect too much personal information could kill all 3 with just one shot.
I think this is the challenge for anybody trying to take on Google with internet search. Google makes most of its money from the search. They are probably smart enough to keep the "A team" assigned to this problem.
Hackers dislike the direction Google Search is taking, but I think they are trying to defend themselves against the competition. No startup can challenge Google on the hardcore internet search. Where they might be able to do that is providing direct answers to most of the questions. This is because for large part of the questions you don't need to index the whole web (just my gut feeling). Get data from Wikipedia, social media sites, price comparison engines etc. The problem becomes more of building partnerships than pure technical stuff.
HN.
It's not hard, click here: https://news.google.com/news/
Then click here: https://www.bing.com/news
Try it on your phone for an exaggerated experience.
Also, except breaking news, there is no difference I could find. Except that google news takes me to some annoying amp pages for some links.
As I pointed out in my original comment, Bing also uses an AMP cache and sends users to AMP pages from the Bing app, which is why saying that anything different about them is ironic makes little sense.
OK, but it hacks the scrolling in the same way amp pages do. So I assumed it was amp.
> promote AMP pages, as you claim.
100% it promotes amp pages.
> Bing also uses an AMP cache and sends users to AMP pages from the Bing app
I am not talking about bing "app". I don't know if such a thing exists. I am talking about www.bing.com/news. Click that link and bask in the glory of blazing fast performance.
That's the first of your problems.
> 100% it promotes amp pages.
When I go to Google News, there are no pages marked as AMP. In my original comment, I talked about AMP results in news searches on Google search, which do exist, just like in the Bing app. Those provide a better experience for me, and I suspect 99% of all users, than the AMP-less DDG results, which is why Google and Bing show them.
> I am not talking about bing "app". I don't know if such a thing exists.
https://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-...
You've demonstrated an even poorer understanding of AMP than the person I originally responded to.
Now some departments are getting more like Etsy - a Shenzhen marketplace. This is good, because there's a lot of random stuff you can get that you don't need to import. It's also bad because it's virtually impossible to know what you should buy if you don't know the brand reputation (and that matters to you).
Take 'usb cable' for example, have a look: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias...
Brands include Rephoenix, Luoriz, Ugreen, Syncwire, RAVPower, Rankie, Benestellar, Onson, Jecent, Emmabin, Brightsnow, Maxteck, choetech, Volutz, Kinps, the list goes on. I got to page 3 before I gave up.
What about headphones? Mpow, OneOdio, BienSound, Alihen, Sephia, ZIYE, Sadon, OMORC, etc.
I'm genuinely curious as to when sellers decided that they must have a brand name for every product, and to hell with the meaning. It's like they all read those "how to sell on Amazon by importing" tutorials.
Even though deep down I know that they're probably just as good as anything you can buy on the high street, the sheer volume of random brands is really off-putting to me for some reason. A bigger problem is that you can miss stuff in the noise - e.g. if you didn't know that Anker have a good reputation, could you tell the difference from any of the other names in that list? Seller churn is also high, so it's not like you can rely on reviews either - that product might be gone in a month.
On a brighter note it really highlights how much you're being ripped off when you buy from a 'name brand' company that's just rebadging stuff from China.
Your example of 'usb cable' is a very good one for highlighting this problem. You are seeing so many brands because of an army of "Amazon Associates Sellers" / FBA - Fullfilled by Amazon Sellers ( I like to refer to them as scam artists) who identify various electronic gadgets, household items, and other things that are in demand, that are light (so cheap to ship) and that are available in bulk in Alibaba or Alibaba Express. They simply slap on their brand logo / name on packaging, pay a few select reviewers to do a 5-star review on amazon and make a whole bunch of sale.
So in essence, the chances are that these 10+ brands you are seeing for 'usb cable' are all sourcing the same exact 'Made in China' product from the same factory in China through Alibaba. Do a search for 'Strawberry corer' and you'll see what I mean :)
This is a very real problem that amazon has been very slow to resolve.
There are even Fiverr gigs that do the product research for cheap. Source: https://www.fiverr.com/gigs/amazon-fba
1. The search engine is pretty bad. Anecdotal example was when I search for a eye mask: there were two different categories — eyes masks and eyes masks / face pillows. Both gave me the same products, but in different order. Why is that?
2. Sometimes there is no guarantee of quality. When I look for an iPad case or screen protector, it seems that the item either has low ratings or the reviews don’t seem genuine.
Scratch that — third problem is that item description is not uniform or standardized. That makes it hard to compare products; only option is to compare reviews which leads back to problem 2.
And then I get off Amazon and use Reddit to find reviews.
Amazon reviews are a pretty bad indicator of quality. You often need to make educated gueses about whether the reviewer knows what they're talking about, whether their standards are the same as yours, whether they're a shill (which is very common on off-brand items), whether the review actually reflects the product and isn't referring to the shipping or customer servie experience, etc.
I found it especially shocking to search for "hoodie" lately... Pages and pages of ripped-off designs superimposed on generic hoodies. If they can't even be be bothered to make an actual picture of their product, how can I trust them to deliver a reasonable product?
My first soldering station was a cheapo whitelabel that died spectacularly after a few months: glowing metal, wicked 60Hz buzz, smoke. Too late for a refund, but the seller offered to swap it out if I paid shipping. I declined, as I intended to move to a name brand. The seller then spent 4 messages trying to argue with me that they were in fact a "name brand". I didn't understand why they cared or bothered.
Now I get it: they were told that establishing a brand name was important, and they must have convinced themselves that it was somehow possible to establish a brand name by white-labeling the same product as a dozen other stores on Amazon.
Regardless if that is a good or bad thing, I'm not sure, but most brands are manufactures, though I'm sure many are white label sellers. White labelling is a dangerous strategy on Amazon, and I'm not sure who is successful at it long term.
1. It wasn't Facebook who beat Google. It was Google who lost to Facebook.
2. It wasn't Google who beat Yahoo and Microsoft. It was Microsoft and Yahoo who lost to Google.
3. Lastly, Snapchat LOST to Facebook. I don't know where he even pulls this out of.
Unlike his takeaway which is nonsense and will probably make you waste years trying to make something stupid happen, here's my takeaway--which is actually opposite of what he'saying--that's much more helpful:
Don't try to fight against a giant in their own turf. As Snapchat, you will never beat Facebook in their own game, Social. As Google, you will never beat Facebook in their own game, Social (This goes both ways. There have been many rumors about Facebook entering search engine arena, but that will never work). Microsoft and Yahoo (A portal whose business model used to be opposite to Google's) can never beat Google in its own game.
The lesson is, play your own game. Don't play into these VCs telling you it's ok to make these stupid attempts. In their eyes, you the founder is just a number. And even if so, this is a terrible advice because there are so many other ways you can win "against" google, facebook, amazon--You simply don't play against them. Google "beat" Microsoft by dominating their own category. Facebook "beat" Google by dominating their own category.
And lastly, Snapchat couldn't "beat" Facebook because they decided to follow stupid advice like this guy gave and fight against Facebook instead of dominating its own category. It had potential at first to invent a differentiated category of its own but went off rails becoming just another social media app, which Facebook then swiftly copied.
If your business model is network based, you can go for "grow now, monetize later" model. Then you need growth even if it means revenue sacrifice.
If your business model is not network based, then revenue/profit.
In case of Snapchat, they made personal gains for the founders and the VCs, but from company point of view, they don't make no money, their growth has stalled. The industry #1 has exactly the same app with larger user base and faster growth.
I can't think of a single reason why this would fall into a success category. If anything, the founders and VCs cashing out so much when the company is dying indicates failure rather than success.
Firefox came and beat MS IE first. Then a while later, Chrome came and beat Firefox.
This is a completely different story though.
First of all, Chrome. Chrome is not a startup. It's a product launched by Google, one of the richest tech companies in the world (and given away for free because they didn't care about directly making money from it). What REALLY happened was it nearly killed off Firefox which was way way poorly funded. So this is irrelevant to this discussion where the topic is about "startups".
Second, let's talk about Firefox. Firefox didn't really "beat" IE because they didn't really make much money out of it. Firefox was a very special case. It wasn't some startup which went against MS. It was a result of Netscape losing to MS, and then deciding to open source it while they're going out of business.
This is not exactly the best scenario when you're building a startup, and even if we're arguing based purely on product (and not whether the company actually managed to extract value out of it), again it's irrelevant to this current thread because Firefox is NOT a "startup".
Lastly, if you're looking at this type of rare occasion and hoping your startup will work out that way, then go ahead and do so, I don't care. I'm just saying there are way better ways to "beat" Google, Facebook, and Amazon. And that's by NOT trying to beat them.
As it stands right now, Amazon has a very serious problem brewing with Walmart's online business. It's the only serious competitive threat Amazon has seen in the last 10-15 years. Instead of seeing contracting sales, Walmart's overall retail business is actually holding its ground; and at that scale, it's an extraordinary thing; their same store sales growth has been positive for 13 straight quarters, even as Amazon has grown vastly larger in the last 3-5 years. Amazon is taking share from other retailers and they're failing to strike a meaningful blow to their biggest retail threat.
But they don't buy all the competition. At least 3 forces prevent that:
1) they have to recognize that the target company _is_ competition. For example, Larry and Sergei tried to sell their young Google company to Excite for $1 million. Excite wasn't interested. They also tried to sell to Yahoo. Yahoo wasn't interested either. (Yahoo became interested much later when Terry Semel was the CEO but by then Google was already worth more than $5 billion.) If you can't see the small company as a threat, you ignore them even if they prostrate themselves before you begging you to buy them. Excite and Yahoo both couldn't see that the little upstart Google was going to make them irrelevant.
2) The competition has to willingly say "yes" to being acquired. Some say "no". A famous example of that is Facebook saying "no" to Yahoo's offer of $1 billion in 2006. Later in 2010, Microsoft and Steve Ballmer also wanted to buy Facebook for $24 billion and again, Mark Z refused. Bill Gates himself refused Ross Perot's early offer of $7 million to buy Microsoft.
3) the competition becomes too expensive to buy. Ebay toyed with the idea of buying Airbnb but the home-lodging company got way too expensive way too fast for Ebay to execute a deal
Acquiring _all_ the competition requires identification of threats (that don't look like threats on the surface) and cooperation from the targeted companies and available funds. You don't get always get that combination and that's why Google and Facebook are not subsidiaries of Yahoo.
Also, the bad hiring A -> B -> C players only makes sense if the "three things" are all in the same business domain because then the A listers from the same domain are used up.
But, when Google is doing things like Android, Self Driving Cars, Youtube, Glucose Sensing Contact Lenses etc. Each domain is different and interesting enough to attract top talent. (When we say Google, we mean Alphabet, right?)
Amazon is such a wild thing and always iterating on new ideas (Alexa, AWS, Etc) I highly doubt they will be limited to "3" things. Also, Amazon have a great trick of commercializing all the services they create for themselves, which seems like it will just keep adding hedges and more surface area of revenue.
Microsoft, still huge. Sure they didn't win search but they have so many other strings to their bow (Xbox, Surface, Windows, etc)
Funny thing is, Microsoft didn't exactly own the search market and then "get beaten" by Google. Google just aced that from the get go and essentially created that market growth by making it possible to search the web so well.
Slack is a great example of how that works. There were lots of players making team chat and the market was not so huge. Then along comes Slack and makes something that is a delight and useful for many people, so much so, that it creates a new outsized market that didn't quite exist in that way before.
So, rather than "get beaten" I think the most likely scenario is that new players will continue to come along and create versions of "products that don't suck" and as a result markets that were once small will, all of a sudden, become huge.
I also think blockchain, right now, is like the internet was in say, 1998, and there will be some huge companies emerging from that tech.
Why do so many people seem to think this? As someone with a background in crypto, I just don't see the resemblance. Blockchains are useful for proof-of-work and Merkle Trees give you a way to compress many individual signatures, but those things are inherently made for distributed decision making and this comes with a lot of overhead. The exact opposite of what a corporation needs.
That's just me, though.
But Google keeps adding at a rate it will be very difficult to compete. It is a moving target. The latest is Google Lens. Basically adding a new type of image search that will be tough to compete with as the resources and algorithms necessary will be tough to match.
1. [2] Apple (1976)
2. [2] Samsung (1969)
3. [4] Amazon.com (1994)
4. [2] Foxconn (1974)
5. [4] Alphabet Inc. (1998)
6. [2] Microsoft (1975)
7. [1] Hitachi (1910)
8. [1] IBM (1911)
9. [3] Huawei (1987)
10. [1] Sony (1946)
11. [1] Panasonic (1918)
12. [3] Dell (1984)
13. [2] Intel (1968)
14. [1] Hewlett Packard (1939)
categories:
[1] old electronics, 70-100 years old companies.
[2] founded few years before or after the invention of microprocessor (1971)
[3] founded at the dawn of the PC era (80s)
[4] founded at the dawn of the internet era (90s)
From each revolution few companies may eventually join the list, but the old rule.
> [...]
> 2. [2] Samsung (1969)
I know, I'm nitpicking here, but I guess you are thinking of Samsung Electronics here, which is just a part of the Samsung Group. Samsung was founded in 1938.
Their consulting and services business sell mostly to Japan. Electronics division is very specialized. Semiconductor processing equipment, test and measurement and so on.
So it is hard to say where those tech giants can be beaten or not unless someone can predict the future. What if there is revolution happens, where PC can be as powerful as the super computer today, that the cloud companies business model and advantage has been invalidated overnight? Don't lose your imagination.
If well managed, large companies stick around for a long time. Can’t see why FB and GOOG won’t be around for at least another 30 years.
Sure, there is SUN, and Sillicon Graphics as an example, but they were badly managed and put all their eggs into one expensive basket and got disrupted.
The only way large companies become truly irrevelant is through:
1) Bad management
2) Ground shifting / seismic shift on the ecosystem or tech. (Think Kodak).
FB has been very proactive in acquiring new trendy companies and in retrospect Instagram’s acquisition was a genius move. (I remember how much talk was at the time at the 1b price for a company with no revenue). Google has been proactive by doing active research, and amazon by doing all kinds of things.
Yahoo and Twitter are classically badly managed companies and while yahoo got sold to irrevelance, I think Twitter is the next one to be truly disrupted.
Lots of survivorship bias in this - Most of their contemporaries such as Atari, Tandy, Commodore are all defunct, and the Unix hardware vendors that all became M&A targets.
How about FB? What are they diversifying in?
VR... i don't know about that.
I would say that given the scale of companies like Amazon in particular, the null hypothesis is more that these companies will exist forever.
Today we are stuck with Google search, tomorrow we will be trapped in off-white Google apartments in Google city, and DuckDuckGo will still only be a search engine.
i think where in the past juggernauts have fallen its usually due to not being wise to megatrends/platform shifts. I'm not saying amzn/fb/googl are immune to these, but they have each in their own way shown a fair amount of nimbleness in the 10+years they have been around, navigating huge shifts in consumer behavior. If they can learn from the past and prevent themselves from ossifying, they will put off their eventual decline for that much longer. I think bezos and zuck have among the best attitudes to change/learning we have ever had in corporate america.
Practically everything on nabla9's list above had to make severe pivots to survive, and many are shadows of their former selves; for many that aren't, I see their demise coming (they've just got so much money from the heyday that the momentum will take time to stop).
2. Ban any site that shows different content to the Google bot vs the user. (looking at you Quora, with your login required to read, Pinterest...)
3. Ban all the myriad of sites that do nothing but list out every possible phone number or random words. AI should have no trouble detecting those.
4. Ban all the sites that do nothing but copy content wholesale from other sites. I thought they had a duplicate content penalty, but it doesn't seem to work.
Do those simple things and you've just made Google search 10x better.
If anything, I expect them to be worst, as SV tech geeks are being replaced by power and money seeking individuals.
I'm not sure what you meant by business here. Windows is a product from MS which is segmented by different markets. There's a business need and a consumer facing need. It got beat in the latter. It also didn't move fast enough to reach the mobile market so it got beat in speed as well.
The consumer facing product has been assaulted. Consumers are buying PCs, and by extension Windows, less. MS was impacted and Ballmer resigned. That was the whole pivot to the Cloud by Satya. All this is common knowledge.
There is super low commitment on new projects (say <1% of work force), compared to a startup that is betting all money and talent it could get on a chance that there is an overlooked market for product X. 100% focus, staying far from a comfort zone and taking the risk is what (in a very few cases though) makes it work.
Basically tech gaint doesn’t have to “burn the ships” and therefore has lower commitment, poor focus, has no sense of (get big or go home) urgency and eventually drops the idea before it bears fruit.
It can offord to say “pass”, but doesn’t need to “bluf” and it doesn’t have the same risk.
And yes, there are multiple winners. Some nibbled at Rome’s borders, carving out a sizable chunk for themselves, some conquered Rome (often not with much long lasted gains for themselves).
The big question is what made those who beat it winners. I would guess lucky timing is a huge factor there. That’s what anybody trying to take (parts of) those giants head on should be worried about.
What makes Apple different from Google, Amazon & Facebook? Curious to hear what people think.
I recommend reading the book by Scott Galloway, it is insightful.
As far as I can tell all "political signalling" means is "I cannot believe what you profess to believe, therefore I assume that you profess it merely to be trendy".
That is the kind of eye-rollingly partisan political "signalling" I'm talking about. If he thinks $100,000 of Russia linked ad-spend on Facebook flipped the votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Florida, and thus we should consider shutting Facebook down for this reason, I really can't take his analysis that seriously.
If we trash every concept someone does not understand, we are cavemen by afternoon.
Any time someone in the world can claim the status of affording an iPhone, they seize the opportunity. Why? Because owning an iPhone is strongly associated with wealth and success. Ask Android users in international markets if they would switch to an iPhone if they could...90% will say yes. Apple gets this, and it will happen.
Indeed the real danger is Google's inability to establish a high-end Android market...they're trying, but it is a pitiful imitation of what Apple is doing
My gut says that Android dominance means that companies in emerging markets build Android first apps, everyone around you has Android phones and you already know how to use the platform, which all leads to the same inertia Apple benefits from in the US.
You're right that they've managed to hang on to their premium branding, I just don't know if this matters in comparison to devices and apps that are actually tailored to local market.
In fact, many startups are created with the purpose of being sold to larger companies.
I'm not sure how viable such a thing would be given that most of facebook's negative aspects are a direct result of them monetizing the platform as much as possible. But I think it's worth thinking about!
It happened a few months ago when as a result of reading some online stories, I decided to delete everything I posted on my Facebook wall; but then I changed my decision to "everything, except for the few best (highest quality? best ratings? maybe a bit of both) things". So I spent a few hours deleting stuff from my wall, while paying attention to the quality and number of likes. And I noticed the pattern that I didn't actually notice before.
I was already aware that I sometimes post smart content and sometimes stupid content, and that sometimes I get a lot of reactions and sometimes barely any. But only now I noticed how strongly are these things anticorrelated. It is almost always the stupid stuff that gets most reactions, and the smart stuff that remains ignored. Dozens and dozens of my old posts, always the same pattern.
After seeing this, I am no longer motivated to spend any energy on my Facebook interaction. Once in a while I share an interesting article, but I don't bother posting a summary anymore; I already expect no one will care, if even someone will see it. And once in a while I share a family photo. And that's all.
Speaking of being able to focus on three things, why? Why that number? Isn't Amazon, for example, competing in Cloud computing, e Books, retail, tablets, content, groceries, home assistants, advertising, and probably a few other major categories? Likewise Microsoft has game consoles, office, cloud offerings, Windows, search, and again, other areas.
I think the thesis, that you can compete with tech giants, is true, but the analysis of the article is brief and poor. The reason you can compete with tech giants is because they are looking for a way to grow their gigantic companies and so they will forgo relatively small markets even if they are promising. I would not bet on your startup to beat Amazon in making budget tablets, or Apple in making premium ones, but if you can identify a niche with a customer that needs to be served you can outcompete major companies because they won't be willing to focus on that niche.
For example, you can't make a better budget or premium tablet, but maybe you make a tablet that floats to serve fishermen. It's a hit, so you work on connecting it to their fish finders, now you're building custom sonar sensors because your brand has a reputation and you want to add features to the tablet. Before you know it, you have a self-driving boat, and you're entering the shipping market automating the work formerly done by seamen. With a big presence in shipping you use your connections in China to start up your own retail website, and now you can compete with Amazon directly because you can arrange cheaper shipping of goods from China to US marketplaces.
I also do think there is some validity to the article's point that you'll be competing against the C team. I'd add on to it that as a startup you'll be more agile. If you're competing against a tech giant they'll be held up by a lot of bureaucracy that won't afflict you. You can match their dev team for competence, move faster, and compete in spaces where they won't want to follow. That's how you won against big companies, not because they are magically limited to paying attention to three areas.
I don't buy much on Amazon nowadays but on about 50% of times when I do go there to buy a non-book product it has been reclassified as "Prime-only"
Normally that passes after a week or so but it does show that Amazon is prepared to sacrifice spontaneous retail sales in order to promote Prime.
they're still rising...but even if they stopped rising, they have amassed the financial resources of nations, and they have the credit to borrow much more. Apple in particular is basically a G8 nation...their cash pile may literally span centuries and they may actually need to hedge against the expiration of the governments whose currency they hold. unlike oil, we will not "run out" of data...these companies will eventually dwarf anything from the industrial age
if you want to "beat" them, (what does that even mean?) do what Elon Musk is doing and create new markets and industries
Make a social network for children. Facebook has too much political inertia to be trusted with such a thing.
Then, as those children grow, continue to come out with services useful to them. They have to be new enough and cool enough that the kids will switch to the new service as they get older.
If you can manage to make your service useful throughout all stages of a person's life, starting with childhood, then you can eventually displace Facebook by refusing to sell.
It won't be easy, and it would take a decade. But it's doable.
You may question the ethics. That's valid. Unfortunately, ethical questions tend to go out the window: Every time a technology becomes possible, it seems to be inevitable. Bitcoin is a perfect example.
Either you build this, or someone else might. And if you care about the ethics, this is an opportunity to build something less draconian than Facebook from first principles.
At least one of the above will be true by 2040.