8 questions you need to ask about your business model | Hacker News Reader

8 questions you need to ask about your business model

thebln.com

17 pointsDarrenH8 comments

Their first example falls flat, since software (like iTunes) can search for music and also simply read the database of other systems. Getting others to do your work for you is unethical; either they do the work because that's actually a feature for the consumer or you're stealing from people. Anything else is customers doing their work for themselves and you acting smug.

I don't think that means it falls flat. It was one of the key things that moved people across. I remember copying CDs into iTunes, downloading stuff from iTunes and putting all my music together. It was only when I got a non Apple MP3 player that I realised that all the Apple content wouldn't play on other systems.

Kept me locked in for years.

That's weird, since I had an iPod from the beginning and I don't remember this issue. So far as I recall, iTunes spat out MP3s and getting access to all of it was a simple matter of using the search function of Windows, something yu had to do anyway even in the days of burning unless you had super awesome memory.

GP was alluding to the .aap or whatever the extension was for DRM-laden tracks sold by ITMS.

Yes, they had DRM for the first 6 years: http://www.macworld.com/article/138000/2009/01/drm_faq.html

It seems true that the labels required this; and it was just serendipitous for Apple that it locked-in users. Although... Amazon dropped the DRM a year earlier (it seems). So it sounds like Apple exploited this good fortune to the hilt, and then some...

It reminds me of how Apple forbids Flash - it's true that flash runs very slowly on mobile hardware; and also that most flash applications are designed for the mouse and don't work ideally with multi-touch; and that this runs counter to Apple's focus on the consumer experience. It's just serendipitous that this leads developers to create exclusive content for iOS, and gain expertise in iOS and Apple's toolchain, which also have sticky qualities (they take effort to learn, and it's not transferable to other platforms).

New products often have natural competitive advantage in many different aspects. It's up to you to find them. It's not something you can just make up for the purposes of having a competitive advantage because if you can't "blame" some real factor for it, customers will hate you for it. So, just recognize those competitive advantages, and don't stuff them up.

Perhaps one approach is to look for possible competitive advantages, and ask if any of them will also happen to give some great benefit to users, that they value.

And kicking on Redhat for providing support is just lame.

Redhat develops just as much if not more as other people and free software developers. From Linux the kernel to gnome Redhat is a company that performs work, and for that they earn alot of money.

Unlike his other examples of highly unethical companies leveraging benefits on others misfortunes.

Highly unethical reasoning confuses the author from noticing difference between a successful scalable business and a succesful scam.

Interesting questions, indeed. But i feel they miss a point by not mentioning a single remedy to a low score. The conclusion doesn't make sense to me:

"(...) by asking yourself these questions and by scoring well on at least some of them you are very likely to substantially increase the long-term competitive advantage of your business."

Wouldn't you need to actually increase the score to increase competitiveness?

Title starts with an irrelevant number.

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