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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

no, it's absolutely not. it's an end-run strategy to subvert competitiveness in a market. practically every dominant company has engaged in these sorts of anti-competitive practices, but that doesn't make it right or defensible. that youtube also provides useful features has little to do with how it came to dominate. it's simply not a product-led outcome.

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Well no.

For example, you claim that Vimeo "vimeo has all of those [features] to some degree".

But it doesn't. Vimeo isn't ad supported (this is literally their main differentiator from youtube). Doesn't appear to do algorithmic curation/recommendation (again, they consider this a differentiator), and has a tiny fraction of the upload rate and watchtime of youtube (so bandwidth and transcoding cost are lower).

Those are related to their distinct strategies: Youtube aims to be the product where anyone can share video for free (that's youtube's strategy!). Vimeo doesn't aim to do that. Doing the first invites challenges of scale that the second doesn't. Youtube operates at a scale where it makes sense to hire silicon engineers to build custom video transcoding chips. That doesn't make sense for vimeo.

You can maybe argue that Youtube was only successful because of Google's existing ad business (although I don't know how true/organizationally valid this argument is), but the idea that the "strategy" behind Youtube was to be illegal is sort of ridiculous.

And heck, OP of the thread even offers examples of successful competitors in the broad video media space: Twitch and TikTok (and arguably also Instagram via Reels). Youtube does have competitors in terms of video social media. It also has competitors in terms of video hosting. What it doesn't have is competitors in terms of scale (Reels and Tiktok limit content size, Twitch stores only a small fraction of streamed videos, vimeo makes you pay for the storage and bandwidth you use). That's due to a lot of technical optimizations that are difficult to replicate.

you're too focused on product here, which is not strategy. it's exactly the common sort of myopia that needs conscientious correction to understand how markets and market distortions operate.

You're trying really hard to ascribe ill motives to the actual strategy of "let's build a cool thing and figure out how to monetize it later, and I'm not sure why. Doing so makes you do weird things like insist that product strategy isn't strategy, and that real strategy is "be anticompetitive". I don't get it.

your goal seems not to understand but to defend, which is why you seem to avoid engaging in the substance of the argument, but rather resorting to an ad hominem. no one owes you feel-good esteem or deference for choosing google's hoards of cash over ethics.

When I engaged on the substance of the argument you said "you're too focused on product here, which is not strategy", which isn't a statement that can be engaged with. It's an unusual claim that you didn't justify. I've repeatedly given examples of what I believe to be more coherent strategies, and you've functionally ignored them (and yes replying with "you're not thinking about this with the right mindset" is not engaging)

To be clear, even if we assume Youtube's rise was anticompetitive, your argument relies on that being the explicit strategy, which well, there's decent documentation to believe it wasn't. Assuming that because a bad thing happened, everyone involved is evil, is weird, and requires you to jump through weird hoops to justify.

let me be blunt: you don't understand what (business) strategy is, nor any of the dimensions of analyzing it. there's no such thing as 'product strategy'; product executes on the business strategy using marketing tactics like building features the target market wants. product features are not a strategy.

in a competitive market, there are two broad strategies available: cost (walmart) and differentiation (apple). youtube coerced its market into being favorable to itself by leveraging the anti-competitive aspects i mentioned earlier. that simply trumps product tactics, and even these two competitive market strategies; it subverts entire markets unfairly and uneconomically. i really can't teach you strategy or market economics in an hn comment; you need to go study that yourself. also, arguing from emotion is a sure-fire way to lead yourself astray.

It's ironic that you are the one who is getting more heated and aggressive in their replies.

Can you point to some solid resources so I can get on your level? You sound like you know what goes on behind closed doors in the business world. Do you blog about these topics anywhere? Thanks.

get an mba? that’s how i gained much of my knowledge, along with general business experience (product management and founding startups).

less flippantly, you can actually find a lot of free mba courses online now. here’s one page listing some resources (halfway down): https://www.uopeople.edu/blog/the-best-free-online-mba-cours...

uopeople offers a cheap online mba, apparently accredited even (i personally can’t vouch for it’s quality though). investopedia is also a good reference resource for looking up random business concepts.

I wonder how much of your knowledge is from the MBA vs experience grinding in real business world experience. I know a handful of people who said MBA was worthless, only did it for connections and pay bump in their product orgs at F500 tech companies. Anyway, thanks for sharing a data point towards MBA, I'll look into it.

Have you read anything by Karl Marx regarding captialism? You seem to know a ton about capital and how it pervades society and social stratification of the workforce and labor.

plenty of folks coast through mba programs learning only superficially, but that shouldn't taint the value of the information itself. i gained plenty of confidence in the areas of finance, marketing, accounting, operations, etc. that i didn't have before and which was directly applicable to being a product manager and startup founder.

i've read a bit of marx but mostly in digest form. das kapital and adam smith's wealth of nations are on my list of older, original works that i want to read in full. i'm sympathetic to the labor theory of value, which both explored in their works, but most modern economists seem to eschew and even fear.

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