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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

Netflix became popular around 2004-2005, but it took another 5 years after that for blockbuster to fail, and it was sudden.

A similar trend was observed with Myspace and Facebook. Myspace was doing well all the way up to early 2008, 4 years after the creation of Facebook, which was already becoming quite popular, but then in late 2008 Myspace suddenly became worthless.

A similar 4 year lag time is observed with the iPhone and the sudden decline of Research and Motion.

In both of those cases a switch of sorts was suddenly flipped.

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At least in the case of Blockbuster, I'd say the lag can be accounted for by the fact Netflix got into streaming in 2007. Prior to that Netflix started eating Blockbuster's lunch, but the service really took off once they managed to mainstream streaming. This was helped, in no small part, by the rapid rise in broadband penetration of that same time period.

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Rise-of-Netflix-and-Fall...

The key thing is the same as in the coronavirus pandemic, it's exponential growth - think of Facebook as the virus, Myspace as the immune system and word-of-mouth being the infection way.

The problem with all the cases you mentioned (and the current fight of Facebook/Meta vs Tiktok) is that the established entity has become entrenched in its ways and too unflexible to adapt, so competitors exploit the weakness and eventually take over.

a lot of times the trigger is usually some kind of massive payment that needs to be made, but then all of a sudden whatever was enabling these payments to happen before is no longer happening and the company goes into default.

> A similar trend was observed with Myspace and Facebook

It's happening right now with Facebook/Instagram and Tik Tok.

it doesn't have to be that long .... VisiCalc, the first "killer app" collapsed about a year after Lotus 1-2-3 was released.

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