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Comment by danielmarkbruce | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a nice sounding narrative that doesn't really hold water, at least from a practical perspective.

Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, AWS, Google Search and a lot of others - they were in fields changing all the time. Unless you define these very abstractly as "communication", "socializing", "entertainment", "compute infrastructure" and "finding things" and say "these things don't change in that they continue to happen" - in which case you can take virtually any product to the most abstract definition and say "it's not changing".

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Well, you've done a nice job of restating the article, actually. It claims that all seemingly revolutionary businesses were not successful because of the things that change (like technology solutions e.g., "finding things", "communication", "compute infrastructure" etc) but on the same unchanging principles (e.g., business opportunities and strategies).

TFA / TL;DR:

    In the last 100 years we’ve gone from horses to jets and mailing letters to Skype. But every sustainable business is accompanied by one of a handful of timeless strategies:

    Lower prices.

    Faster solutions to problems.

    Greater control over your time.

    More choices.

    Added comfort.

    Entertainment/curiosity.

    Deeper human interactions.

    Greater transparency.

    Less collateral damage.

    Higher social status.

    Increased confidence/trust.

Then I've done a bad job communicating what I meant. My point is, (virtually) every single product can make the claim they are making a bet on something that doesn't change. Both good and bad products. Failed and successful.

The entire article says nothing of practical value. Everyone is betting on something that doesn't change and something which does.

It's not about products (business tactics). It's about business philosophy and business strategy.

And every business creating a new product or service can claim they are following this business philosophy and/or business strategy. They just have to talk at the right level of abstraction.

Very few of these things seem to have gotten better overall, so I’d say that most of these companies have failed, as has the overall strategy.

Not sure about this list. I thought apple succeeded, as Thom put it as solving problem of users even though user may not even aware of it. Kodak did not. I am afraid toyota against Glasgow (hydrogen …) as well.

Customer customer customer …

Hydrogen is going to displace batteries. The mistake is with companies who bet everything on li-ion batteries and not other ideas.

Yeah, Sears had a catalog business for like a century. Whatever went wrong a Sears, it wasn't that they had a corporate culture that taught them people only want to buy things at your physical store.

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