Is this a Feature or a Company? | Hacker News Reader

Is this a Feature or a Company?

thenextweb.com

21 pointstheforay14 comments

An outlier like Google can probably be used to disprove almost every rule of thumb you can think of. That doesn't mean it's not a valid question to ask.

Possibly interesting point, backed by stupid data.

Yahoo was a directory, originally. BackRub was a search engine, not a "technology to index pages."

Both of these were stand-alone systems, not necessarily a part of anything else. That's the definition between a "feature" and a "product."

Extending it from product to company just makes the argument dumber. Since that would require, you know, a business.

"Is this directory of things on the internet a feature, or a product and the basis of a company?"

I would think that anyone, and certainly the Yahoos, at the time, would have said "This is the basis of a company," because there were hard copies of the web being printed every year.

I've seen this debate come up many times, and I think people are trying to make a distinction that doesn't always exist. Sure we can always point at something and say it's an outlier (thanks to Gladwell), but if we thought about it, we could rattle off 100s of companies which could really be considered 'features'.

The author's examples are pretty horrible, but consider... Xobni is an extension to outlook, and yet they have built a solid business from this.

Flickr's photo sharing was a feature of a game they were developing before they turned it into a stand-alone business.

Blue-Ray, Dolby, THX can all be considered 'features' as they are not a product in themselves, but an improvement of an existing product. Gracenote & AMG metadata services.

I suspect many of these were originally thought of as features before a business model was discovered for them.

I dunno, there are some nifty things that you can't turn into companies. Sure there are things that some people thought was too small but turned out to be significant, yet for each one of those, there are 1000 other startups that thought their idea had a business plan, but didn't.

Case in point: I have an idea for a cell phone program to set the ringtone volume relative to the background noise (the ring is loud when your surroundings are loud, and quiet when your surroundings are quiet). It'd be an awesome feature to have on cell phones, but there's really nothing to sell.

I think it's much less about the idea you have for the product, but much more about the business plan you use to make money.

Is this a blog post or a tweet?

Innovation sometimes means making a bet that a given "feature" is worth focusing on and doing well. [112 chars]

I like his point about focus in new companies. Do one thing, make it work. When it does, use your expanding group of resources to add on.

I don't understand his distinction between companies and features. If you have a product that can stand on its own, clearly a business can be built around it. But I don't think selling features that will contribute to a larger product is any less legitimate of a business. A hardware store can be a very healthy business even though a bolt isn't very useful until it's attached to something larger.

I think the point of the question is, "Does this fit into a vision for product(s) that a company can be built around?" The answer for many of the twitter-feature startups is obviously NO. So its an important question for many people to ask.

Outliers like Google are the exception. Not the Rule. There are very few exceptions to a over used rule.

Congratulations! You Won!

What did you win? The award for lowest content-to-bullshit-ads-ratio in the universe.

I've seen spamblogs with more content than that.

Who cares? As long as you can monetize it, it's a company.

It's a feature if users don't want to pay for it. It's a company if users do.

Facebook is a feature :)

Not what I expected - interesting point.

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