Perl is the only way to go for serious CGI scripts. It’s so powerful, Python is limited and clunky by comparison. And a new language with syntactically important whitespace? Seriously? It will never displace Perl!
Eh, maybe. well, nice talking. I'm going to go back to writing CFML. My boss bought a bunch of licenses with our last funding round, so I have to use it. I don't think it's going to make it any easier to write our reverse auction site for pet food discount coupons (don't tell anybody - we're still in stealth,) but whatever.
If that's the case, if Google could cause massive disruption by pulling out of the EU, they have effectively monopoly power in that market. So if that's the case, the suit is anything but disingenuous.
Misleading headline: most people don't install an app every month, but what about the apps they already have on their phone?
Edit: it's misleading because the article actually says 65% of smartphone users download zero apps in an average month. That doesn't mean most people never download apps. Just not every month.
It's not particularly misleading, it re-emphasizes a very strong - and well understood - point: the majority of smartphone users do not download very many apps.
The better criticism of this article, is that it's already well known that most smartphone users 1) don't download many apps and 2) don't use very many apps day to day.
Why is that? It's because most apps are not useful or valuable. If they were, people would use them.
The majority of people also do not visit a hundred Web sites each day. Rather, they stick to a very small number of sites, and tend to visit them frequently. No surprise app use is similar.
It mislead me greatly. The headline is a very surprising claim that they're not participating in the app system at all, ignorant of its benefits. But actually they're already satisfied with the apps they have, and use some of them a lot.
How is that misleading? I think that's the point of the entire article. People aren't downloading new apps which means they're likely not plugged in to the app discovery scene. There's a much smaller surface area for developers targeting new customers than the number of smartphone owners.
> which means they're likely not plugged in to the app discovery scene.
That is a very significant point.
I bought my wife a Google Play voucher at Christmas, and she was so overwhelmed by the mess that is the Play Store that it took her three months to find a decent solitaire app.
Everytime she would go looking for one she had to wade through pages of junk and just gave up.
Eventually I found one recommended on a forum and even then when we searched for the exact name in the Play Store it was only in the second row of results.
App discovery is HARD, particularly for people unfamiliar with app stores. I am not surprised that they just don't bother.
I thought that for a while, but the thing is that Facebook's actually pulling in revenue. Internet tells me they have a PE of 60, which is high (20 is normal for a mature company) but not order-of-magnitude insane. If Facebook is overvalued then advertising as a whole is, and that doesn't seem likely in this age of metrics and PPC competition.
During the '00 bubble people said Yahoo's valuation was inflated because all the bubble companies spent their money on Yahoo ads. But for my money Yahoo has turned out to be worth its bubble valuation. Even if most of its value has come from a few clever investments, well, sounds like Facebook's doing the same thing.
Probably. But if you put yourself in the shoes of the executive team at Facebook, buying WhatsApp killed off a potential threat , and it was worth 8% of market cap to do that. Everyone talking about how much WhatsApp is worth vs some other company is missing that point.
Warren Buffett looks for investments with an economic moat around their economic castle. If a startup could get close to doing that much damage to Facebook, maybe Facebook's business isn't very defensible.
Facebook has a lot of business moats, but when it comes to the fleeting attention of the youth, and trends, there is no way to moat that. The second you moat a generation's trend, the next generation declares you old and busted and will do anything but use you.
I actually think this is awesome. This means a few motivated individuals can put together a niche social network and have a guaranteed buyout from Facebook. Basically, if you get big enough, they have to buy you.
I think the only option they really have is to spin off new social networks to cater to new generations and become just a holdings company for them. Sort of a YC of social networking. Their main advantage would be the ready source of funding vs a random college student thinking up the next Whatsapp or Instagram.
Successful social businesses have a big moat in the form of network effects. If it were any easier to cross the social-networking moat, Facebook would not have paid $19 billion for Whatsapp. Attracting and retaining users is hard.
The numbers needed to match Facebook are big. The fact that Whatsapp, Viber, Line, etc are even able to approach those numbers speaks volumes: they have succeeded in executing on their businesses, and there is demand in the market for solid messaging products that evidently the incumbents have not been able to fill. Buying out a (exceptionally successful) startup before it becomes a potential competitor makes total sense.
Attracting and retaining users isn't hard. Attracting and retaining users that will pay you is hard. Give out free slices of cake to people on the street and you'll have lots and lots of users, and they'll probably come back. Selling marketers billboard space behind your free cake stand isn't very profitable unless the cake is very cheap - but if the cake is cheap then just about anyone can bake cakes.
Have you tried? It is hard, especially in a saturated market with plenty of choices. For mass media (TV, news, social), the scarcity relationship is reversed: you're effectively competing for the user's time and attention. Almost zero-sum, especially when considering the allocation of advertising dollars.
Additionally, the barrier of entry is low, since anyone can make a Twitter clone in 20 lines of Ruby on Rails. So you'd be trying to carve out a niche in social, fighting against network effects and the dozen other college dropouts working on the same idea, while hoping Facebook won't decide to implement your differentiating feature. That's not easy.
> Attracting and retaining users that will pay you is hard.
For purely discretionary purchases, yes. This is what makes the success of eg, Viber all the more remarkable. They made a $900 million business by selling electronic stickers. Anyone can sell stupid stickers, but it takes sheer execution to get $900 million for it. Not easy at all.
Since it's so difficult to get paying users in social, you can hedge by relying on a (slightly) less elastic source of revenue: selling those eyeballs and clicks to advertisers. But the traffic needs to be high and consistent for a scalable operation. And again, you're back to square one. Not so easy.
Successful social businesses have a big moat in the form of network effects. If it were any easier to cross the social-networking moat, Facebook would not have paid $19 billion for Whatsapp. Attracting and retaining users is hard.
I know of multiple ways of trying to estimate the magnitude of network effects. All come up with social networks creating O(n log(n)) value for users. If true, that result demonstrates that network effects are significant, but a better competitor does not have to have nearly the scale you'd think to be able to compete head on against the big giants.
That said, I wouldn't recommend going head to head versus FB for your next startup. But there will be no shortage of future companies posing a threat to FB like the one that FB posed to MySpace before it. And like MySpace posed to Friendster earlier on.
Let's be honest. FB has a lot of advantages here. They are the first mover, they have a ton of resources, and they have appropriate levels of paranoia about this issue. But still I'd give them substantially less than even odds of being the social king when, say, 2030 rolls around.
> I wouldn't recommend going head to head versus FB for your next startup.
Yep. The threat to FB or any similarly dominant company isn't head-on, but rather sideways, where peripheral businesses could eat into their core. So far, Facebook is doing a pretty good job of recognizing those risks.
An interesting exercise is to think of how companies have handled those risks and the effects of that. Eg, IBM's stance on software as they gave Microsoft exclusive licensing rights, only to backtrack with OS/2 and giving up. Microsoft dismissing the Internet, then playing "me-too" ever since with Bing, Windows Phone, Azure, etc etc. Google's social networking efforts with Orkut, Buzz and Plus.
> less than even odds of being the social king when, say, 2030 rolls around.
Agreed, when you're dominating a competitive industry, it's pretty hard to stay on top indefinitely. Nowhere to go but down.
But it isn't his money: VC funds raise money from other investors (aka limited partners). It's like asking a banker or hedge fund manager if there's a stock market bubble. They won't say yes because if investors pull their money out of equities, the banks and hedge funds are screwed.
Worse, Facebook makes a lot of mobile advertising money from app install ads. If startup investors cut back the flow of money, that advertising revenue dries up. There will be a glut of unemployed developers just as Facebook starts reporting declining revenues. Facebook will need to start reducing costs, not hiring, and definitely no acquihires (startups with viable business models might be a different story).
Google might clean up with their pick of the best surviving startups and the best devs going cheap, because they have more diverse sources of advertising revenue, but they might also be under pressure to control costs if investors panic and flee tech.
That Facebook makes money from mobile advertising is a good point: In the dot com era, many dot coms made money very briefly selling ads or services to other dot coms, who were willing to pay way too much. Now many companies are valuable because other companies will pay too much for user acquisition. If they stopped, their would be repercussions for a lot of companies in the middle (not Facebook) who see their business model go away.
If the base of the value chain isn't making money (and I think honestly in the current case even the middle isn't) the whole ecosystem will probably contract.
That's exactly what you would expect if a "low end disruption" is just getting started. The low-cost disruptor picks off some but not all of the market, and doesn't immediately compete for the most attractive customers (because that fight's too hard for them at the moment).
That's what puts the incumbent in an "innovator's dilemma": do you chase the high end and high margins, and if so which high-end niches do you chase (gamers who want graphics performance, design-lovers who want a precision machined marvel of industrial design) or do you go lower cost and high volume? The latter is a race to the bottom, so the incumbents tend to pick the former and retreat up-market. It's not unusual for the incumbent's profits to increase temporarily when this happens because of their focus on the most profitable customers.
The problem is it doesn't last: the low-cost producers who are already good enough for the low end of the market continue to improve, until they become good enough for the middle of the market too, and grab more and more market share and more and more profit share. And then, looking for even more growth, they head for the top end of the market (or get disrupted themselves).
Ironically, if there wasn't an up-market to retreat to, there would be no dilemma. Android and iOS would have to compete head to head for the same customers with the same requirements (rather than one taking all the budget consumers and the other taking the gamers and others with higher requirements).
As it is, we could be seeing a low-end disruption, and the high-end consumers will be the last to notice.
The thing you’ve gotten wrong with wrong the “design lovers” you mentioned is that Apple’s customer base are entirely those quote-unquote design lovers who happen to be just normal consumers.
The entire point of the article is that competing on user experience pretty much side-steps the whole theory of low-end disruption.
I understood the article, thanks. I'm just not convinced.
The debate hinges on this: is UX a special basis of competition that can't be disrupted? Will consumers pay a premium for better UX forever? Will the cheaper alternative never be "good enough"? Won't people put up with a few minor annoyances? What if it saves them money?
I think UX is a hygiene factor: when it's bad it annoys you to the point where you do something about it, but when UX is good enough, most people start worrying about other things.
That's different from design: I think some people will continue to pay a premium because they love Jony Ive designs and they can afford it. And some will pay for a status symbol. And some will need the performance. But none of that is the mass market.
Android has been "good enough" for millions of people.
From their ugly start to Lollipop, they have been good enough for many people to choose Android as their primary platform.
This is similar to many of Christensen examples, such as the mini mills disrupting "Big Steel" companies by providing "good enough" cheap steel, and slowly but steadily getting better and better.
Android right now is in that phase, getting better and better, and now is as good, if not better, than iOS.
