52 Bicycles

Not a great fan of the film (”Are you suffering as much as I am?” YES!!!) but seems apropos

On the heels of my prior post with a funny title, I confess to inspiration from the ineffable Mr. Arrington. In his report AOL to Release YouTube Clone he discusses what I see as a huge problem with the currently fashionable plus-one strategies:

I am seeing an increasing trend of the big guys simply copying what successful startups are doing. AOL with this product and AIM Spaces. Google with Google Notepad and a flurry of other projects, etc. The only large company that is even experimenting with unproven concepts at this point is Microsoft with its various Live.com ideas. I’d like to see more experimenting at the big company level.

And from the “mudpit” of his comments we see the following wisdom from Wil Schroter:

Mike, I don’t know if you were making this point specifically, but the fact is that most innovative new companies can have their functionality and business model replicated verbatim in a matter of months.

Ironically it’s the big size of these companies that typically keeps them from getting that done. Their management gets in the way of their productivity.

I sometimes wonder how these companies turn a simple single piece of functionality into an entire company and get $5m in funding to go with it. Does every kid at Stanford who completes his senior project get a VC investment with his diploma? (I went to Ohio State - we get $20 and discount tickets to Buckeye games)

I’d say it’s worse than that - young techies have been knocking down technological barriers in ways that are publicized - and highly duplicable. by focusing on front-end components, which anyone could duplicate once they saw what worked, the young’uns are just setting up the competition.

There are solutions - be a bit more stealthy while getting early feedback. Find something hard to duplicate, so that it is worth buying rather than buidling. Fit into an ecosystem so you can transcend the walled garden effect.

But I wonder whether the emphasis on being cool will overwhelm, particularly in Boston. I run businesses that incorporate technology. I think our technology is pretty amazing, but it’s in service to the economics, and to the customers, rather than trying to get the ego-stroke. By focusing on the former, we have something that is less prone to be cloned.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Technology Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Reddit This