Ripe for Disruption | Hacker News Reader

Ripe for Disruption

jacquesmattheij.com

61 pointslsinger35 comments

LinkedIn just isn't for Jacques, it's not actually ripe for disruption. People like to condemn LinkedIn's tactics for engagement, and devoted indie + company salarymen like to condemn it for being a useless spammy recruiter hell.

But, end of the day, LinkedIn is still a beast, has a tremendous network effect to defeat, and actually works for its millions of users:

* many developers actually like to get the various recruiter and big co contacts

* for business guys, LinkedIn actually works to make credible cold contacts with people who would be interested in doing business

* the emails that tell you when your friend switches jobs are useful and important in the same way Facebook's birthday reminders are

* LinkedIn is doing a decent job further managing the product - it has gotten more useful over the years

So what if you think endorsements are lame and sometimes LinkedIn accidentally tells you a profile update means a new job, when it doesn't. So what if you are a special snowflake who, with hundreds of thousands of others, doesn't find LinkedIn useful, and too aggressive? It's those very engagement tactics that make sure the network is complete and the metadata is fresh.

Wait, why are Facebook's birthday reminders important?

Some people like to be told "Happy Birthday" even if they know most people only "remembered" because of a notification.

Sometimes, it can be useful to be reminded of a birthday for somebody you actually want to get a gift for.

Its gives you an excuse to remind someone that you exist in their friends list. Socializing/Networking is actually more important on LinkedIn than on FB, because people usually have (or have had) social relations with FB people IRL, but on LinkedIn you need those excuses because otherwise you msotly just have business relations

I'm not so sure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation

To actually disrupt an industry, there has to be a change that makes it possible, or some new niche or angle to attack a problem from.

I don't really see that in a lot of these examples.

There's a pretty good case that "mobile" is the 10x force and major change that opens up basically every early web property to disruption.

Payments / bitcoin innovation is a second likely 10x factor (in particular for ebay).

Agreed on mobile, not sure about payments/bitcoin at the present time (but it could very well become something like that).

Agreed, the author is using "disruption" to mean "compete with". Microsoft did not really disrupt IBM, it just changed the competitive landscape.

The Innovator's Dilemma has a much more nuanced view of disruption: an inferior product that ends up beating the entrenched player because of a side-benefit. It's pretty relevant if you want to take on eBay, LinkedIn, or Google: you're not going to build a better search engine than Google, but you can build one that respects privacy, runs without ads, etc. if that's what users really care about.

Crossing the Chasm also talks about this: it's very, very difficult to beat an established company at their own game. You're more likely to do so by attacking a niche they are not interested in, or are weak in, and growing from there.

Establishing a beach-head is a very slow road but it has a good chance of success. What I'm getting at in the post is that there are some game-changing circumstances at play since those companies were founded and they all appear to have huge, not so easy to fix blind spots. That creates opportunities. Compare ebay or Google with Amazon and Zappos. I definitely do not see Amazon and Zappos as vulnerable when it comes to their core, Google is at its core not a search engine anymore but an advertising company and exactly there they are left wanting. Ebay is hurting badly right now, someone that moves fast might be able to inflict serious damage before the window of opportunity closes again.

Naturally, none of this is going to be easy. But I think it just might be doable.

Changing the competitive landscape could very will be the definition of disruption.

I agree on this point. I think wintel disrupted IBM in the fortune 500 terminal space with PCs. which is eating the mainframe. but I think a technology change needs to happen to disrupt a space. You have to have some kind of strategic advantage that the compitition doesn't have gonig for them. I read an interesting article that said that customers need at least 10x increase in value for a company to ride a product etc to make it to an ipo.

I second that. If you actually read "The Innovator's Dilemma" it defines disruption narrowly as when a start-up overtakes an incumbent with an inferior product that appeals to a new market. If you really want to "disrupt" a company, don't look for problems with the big competitors. Look for potential markets they're ignoring.

But all you start-up people use "disrupt" to describe any competition between start-ups and big business. Worse, you all seem to think start-ups have the advantage, because the incumbents are big and old and you are nimble and young.

Sorry, but history has shown that market leaders will almost always crush you. If you innovate, they will just copy your innovation and throw more marketing dollars behind it. Historically, start-ups only prevail when they reach out to new markets ignored by the competition. Big, successful businesses are totally beholden to their current customers. They can't reach out to new markets without cannibalizing profits of their current product line.

Incumbents wont always copy innovations. When you innovate to hit an overshot section of the incumbents market, or non-consumers in the incumbents market, you create asynchronous skills. The incumbent typically will ignore you because you're taking their low end clients, but eventually, the innovations that won the low end clients will improve and you will move up market. That is how disruption works, almost always through innovation.

I think when you say innovation you mean sustaining innovation, which is where you build something that serves the most profitable section of the market, therefore motivating incumbents to copy you. When playing that game it's almost always a lose for the startup, unless you quickly sell out to an incumbent.

There are some situations where incumbents will be motivated to fight startups on low profit clients. Typically this is when you have an incumbent who's profitability comes from having a high volume of low profit customers. In cases like that, it's not likely you will get a foothold unnoticed.

I should have been more clear. "Sustaining" innovations is what I'm talking about. As long as incumbents see an innovation as valuable to their current customer base, they will adopt it. It's the innovations that appeal to outside markets that start ups thrive with.

Thank you for clarifying this.

I think EBay will be death by a thousand cuts... niche sites offering similar functionality (national/international auctions, community trust rating), but targeted a particular interest.

My example here is Reverb.com, an online auction site for musical instruments and gear (particularly rock instruments, not classical). Reverb.com provides a gorgeous, Etsy-like interface, terrific targeted marketing, etc. It's backed by a major used instrument vendor (Chicago Music Exchange), and is quickly gaining momentum. Once sellers can have the same chance of sale and the same kinds of prices that EBay fetches, and buyers have enough selection to make the site really sticky (it's practically designed for window-shopping), some people will simply stop using EBay altogether in favor of Reverb.

Etsy is another case in point. They've been around for a while, but they offer a far superior customer and vendor experience within their fairly narrow niche of handmade crafts. I'm sure we'll also see custom car seller sites (most of the old ones are as antiquated and ugly as EBay), toy collector sites, all the things EBay covers in its one-size-fits-all approach.

EBay is lousy for window-shopping, but that's what collectors and nerds want to do. That's where the disruption will happen.

I would not say these very large and engrained services are "ripe for disruption" unless you totally revolutionize the feature-set of such products. I think things that are ripe for disruption are things like traditional IRL services...like how Uber is greatly disrupting taxi services, for instance. I would like to see disrupts in grocery stores, point-of-sale systems, and other tangible services that can be revolutionized with new technologies. I think disruption is more about an industry than taking on a single company.

If anyone is Ripe for Disruption, it's data carriers, especially on mobile. Those crooks practise legalised piracy at the highest level. And they are entrenched all right. Any ideas?

Mesh networks. But I think those don't have a business model.

And it's very low throughput/high latency.

I actually don't think so. If it is just for contacting people in your neighborhood, then it works fine. If it is for people in the same city, then the city could organize something as a utility. Mesh doesn't have to mean 'on every users' device' or even p2p.

The hard thing is that most successful disruptions come from startups who are ignored by incumbents. In data they're motivated to keep even the lowest profit clients, so startups face their wrath from the beginning. It isn't pretty.

That was a pretty good article that appealed to me because I don't like the trend of fewer but much larger companies crowding out competitors. Google is a particularly interesting case because their income stream from ads really might not work long term on mobile.

I have never been much of a fan of Facebook but seeing how most of my family's use of the Internet is wrapped up in Facebook, they might be around for a very long time.

Yes. I don't see my none-IT friends/family jumping off the Facebook/ebay/Flickr ship even if a better alternative came along no matter what the benefits.

I agree with the article but Myspace and Yahoo are commonly used examples of ousted market leaders but the market was young(er) when they were disrupted.

Disruptive innovation is often more about a superior business model than better technology. Technology is an enabler.

I can't take someone seriously who says "I don’t see the value of LinkedIn". That's obtuse or willfully ignorant. You don't have to like LinkedIn but it's immense value as the world's resume database is patently obvious.

I am kind of surprised facebook has not been disrupted. Even more surprising is that nobody is even trying. People just throw their hands in the air and say nobody will leave facebook and all the existing people are well and truly settled there.

It can be discouraging when a company with the resources of Google tries and fails.

wait... ads, photos, and niche social networks, are "ripe" for disruption? haven't those three industries been the focus of some 90% of startups for the last 10 years at least?

Google Adwords is absolutely ripe for disruption. Actually all of Google's services, except Mail and Search, are not great.

Cable Television. Please, for the love of science, someone disrupt this soon :(

Isn't Netflix already doing this?

The disruption is surely TV without channels and relying on the Internet for distribution. How do you picture Canle TV disruption looking?

Someone did. Netflix (and Youtube and Twitch.TV and Hulu...).

For my use case, it just needs mainstream sports :) (and I find the Twitch.TV acquisition interesting because of that ).

I just suscribed to Cable TV to watch the (football/soccer) World Cup, I wouldn't have considered it otherwise.

Other companies ripe for disruption:

* SAP * PTC * EMC

(Please! please! please! please!)

Not sure who PTC or EMC are...

I worked at Bridgestone Golf for a few months (a tyre company that also made golf items, go figure), and because we were situated in their manufacturing plant, we were lucky enough to use SAP for our sales and distribution.

It was the most horrendous experience of my life, and I sat there thinking that surely there would be a part of this beast that could disrupted. However, SAP is such a sprawling mess that where would you start?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com