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Beautiful Evidence
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Me Too!
David Hornik posts a gigantic list of consumer “web 2.0″ companies, which is actually truncated from an enormous list by Boris Karadogan.
This is telling, and bothering me - too great a focus on building a “cool product” will generate this kind of down-the-middle head-to-head that will cause a lot of people to lose their shirts. In truth, most “cool products” are derivative - very few raw product ideas are truly disruptive. And many of these products, I am sure, were pitched as being different from anything in the market that has significant share - but they are not different from those that existed within six months of their launch.
I contrast this product-oriented approach with solving a problem for a specific universe of customers, for which one can create marketing barriers to entry, or existing in a universe of everyone else’s systems (per my idea of cosmopolitanism) to transcend the competition’s barriers.
The few that transcend this mess will win. The many that do not will die. We all know the tale of creatures that cry “me too!” en masse - let’s try to avoid their fate.