Comments on: Critical Points of Differentiation

By: Mike K

Mike K — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 21:53:50 +0000

That iphone/blackberry table is why I wish palm was marketing the pre more against the blackberry.

Basically, the pre does everything but the “apps” category better (or equivalent) than either. Alas, since they are positioning the pre against the iphone, and the pre so clearly is losing out the apps category, it seems inadequate.

So I was hopeful that the vastly superior apis that palm has would attract developers, then their naivete caused them to bungle and jwz shat on that. Every dev I know that knows I have a pre linked me to that atrocity en masse.

I’m hoping this won’t end like the Newton.

By: JM

JM — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:06:47 +0000

“except for hipster posers who need to be different about everything”

What was Apple’s catchphrase for several years? Oh yeah…

By: Shalmanese

Shalmanese — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 06:59:05 +0000

As for your much broader thesis, I think you’re suffering from selection bias. It’s not that arguments prove that experts & popularity disagree, it’s that disagreement is largely caused by experts & popularity disagreeing. When the experts agree with popular opinion, there’s not much to debate, it’s just the default choice (except for hipster posers who need to be different about everything).

What’s the best search engine? experts & the masses all think it’s google. What’s the best web server? Everyone says apache. What’s the best image editor? Photoshop.

The problem is, these aren’t memorable because there isn’t any debate about them. I would argue that cases where experts & popularity disagree are in the minority, if only because the cases where experts & popularity agree are truly mundane (what’s the best thing to make tissues out of? paper)

By: Shalmanese

Shalmanese — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 06:51:50 +0000

I think you’re wrong about the iPhone. Look at growth rather than raw numbers. What’s carrying RIM & WinMo is legacy momentum. Sure, some people are in love with their RIM phones but a lot more are forced to use them because large companies have already made a significant investment in supporting a RIM ecosystem. Same with WinMo, it’s the best default choice for a “smartphone” which doesn’t particularly care to distinguish itself in any way other than price.

Once the iPhone gains it’s own infrastructure momentum, I’ll bet those numbers become reversed.

By: Matthew Maroon

Matthew Maroon — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:59:35 +0000

I wouldn’t say FSL has been successful at all. To do so would be to say that the guy who holds two black aces is successful because he’s not folding on the turn when there’s 8-9-10-J of diamonds on the board and the weak-tight guy raised.

FSL still has less traffic than us even after we closed down. More people get to our site accidentally (probably from legacy search engine links and blogs) than go to theirs on purpose. Check out any traffic analytics service, it’s clearly not doing well. I actually hope they do succeed (don’t tell them I said that though!) but they won’t. They aren’t making any headway, and they don’t seem to be doing any of the things they need to do to make headway. They’re just doing the same thing week after week and getting the same results. I know, I’ve been there.

Competition wasn’t really the reason we shut Draftmix down, as we were in a way creating a market. It was more than anything else that a side project took off, and we had limited resources, so we allocated them to the products that have lots of customers and bring in lots of revenue. Had we had enough time and money to devote to it, I think Draftmix could have been successful with the right partnerships.

I’ll probably talk about Draftmix specifically soon.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:47:05 +0000

Is this how you explain the failure of DraftMix and the success of FSL?

By: Matthew Maroon

Matthew Maroon — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:06:12 +0000

I think that’s just as true here now where Southwest is taking over.

By: Jack

Jack — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:05:06 +0000

I think this concept is most distinct in the airline industry, where the budget airlines in Europe understood this deeply and exploited it to build huge share. They realized that for a large majority the only things that matter are the price of the flight and that the shit gets there on time, so they slashed everything else (food, service, baggage allowances, etc.) to the point of hilarity and did well because of it.

There’s no way you could say that the sensory experience on their planes was better, but that didn’t matter to most people because they differentiated on the two dimensions that matter.