Projects and Companies

Post by eloff » Thu, Aug 13, 2015, 1:00 PM UTC

w1ntermute wrote: post #41

eloff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DropBox fit that category. It was a solved problem for the people on HackerNews. "Oh we already have rsync for that". They had a very critical reaction here, most people thought the idea didn't have any value, but now look at where they are. I also think that back when Amazon started, a lot of people laughed at the idea of selling books online. In fact for many, many years with Amazon making huge losses people predic…

> In fact for many, many years with Amazon making huge losses people predicted they would fail. Amazon has been making huge losses for many years because they were reinvesting in expansion, which is very expensive for them. Amazon's investors understand and support these efforts. That's different from something like Dropbox, where they can't get the majority of users to pay for the service: http://www.businessinsider…

That's the situation now, and nobody is thinking they're going to fail now. But back in the early days of Amazon the sentiment was different.

Post by kedean » Fri, Aug 14, 2015, 1:26 PM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #50

mtberatwork wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Google came about I don't recall anyone thinking that it (indexing the web, page rank, etc) was a bad idea. Everyone knew search was horrible at the time and many established players were simply directories with thin search layers. Yes, there were established competitors, but none of them were really strong aside from a tiny minority (altavista for example). I don't recall anyone considering Facebook a bad idea…

I agree that when Google came out it was far better than its competitors. Facebook is a bit different in that the market they went after was the right one not that their product was that much better. Zuck may have been lucky at the start, but he soon realised that he was on the right path and stuck to it.

Facebook had a secret ingredient too, they were one of the only sites on the Internet to use exclusivity correctly. They built up hype and got users drooling by slowing becoming available to more groups, and once they became available to everyone they were already established and validated. Of course luck and a simple design factored in too, but I think the exclusivity was the biggest part.

Re: Projects and Companies

Re: Projects and Companies