Joel Liu's Library tagged → View Popular
Hacker News | Ask HN: How did you market your app when there were already a lot like yours?
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Google this phrase or buy the book:
http://www.amazon.com/Differentiate-Die-Survival-Killer-Comp...
My favorite passage:
"The best way to really enter minds that hate complexity and confusion is to oversimplify your message. The lesson here is not to try to tell your entire story. Just focus on one powerful differentiating idea and drive it into the mind. That sudden hunch, that creative leap of the mind that "sees" in a flash how to solve a problem in a simple way, is something quite different from general intelligence. If there's any trick to finding that simple set of words, it's one of being ruthless about how you edit the story you want to tell. Anything that others could claim just as well as you can, eliminate. Anything that requires a complex analysis to prove, forget. Anything that doesn't fit with your customers' perceptions, avoid."
with particular emphasis on:
Just focus on one powerful differentiating idea and drive it into the mind.
Why should anyone choose you?
Network Effects And Scale Economies (aka Spolsky vs. Heinemeier) - Continuations
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And he is right to point out that scale economies can make a huge difference in software. Because the cost of making software (whether installed or SaaS) is mostly fixed, any incremental sale provides 80%+ of gross margin. That means that once you have covered your fixed cost you have a lot of “play money” to start throwing around. You can, like Spolsky’s Oracle example, spend heavily on marketing (and unless you believe that marketing is 100% useless) that will make a difference to sales. And of course here is where things start to get interesting, because you can have such a strong feedback loop that it allows the first player that gets to scale to become 10x bigger than the next player (grow faster, make more money, spend more on marketing, grow even faster).
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So I believe the assertion that bug tracking is definitely not a network effect business is wrong. The effects may be weaker, but anybody offering software today and not thinking about how to create and sustain network effects in what they are doing is missing a big opportunity.
Hacker News | Bug tracking isn't a network-effect business
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It doesn't have to be a network-effect business for customers to prefer the popular product as a "safe" choice.
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This is one of the big reasons why a lot of software is priced low enough that someone can pay for it with a credit card, and lots of software priced over $50,000 but very little between those two numbers. Also once you go down the enterprise software route the quality of your sales process matters more than the quality of your software. A good read on that is http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/0....
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Bug tracking isn't a network-effect business - (37signals)
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Facebook sucks you in because everyone you know is using it. You go to eBay to find something because you know someone is selling what you want to buy. Oracle wins in the enterprise because there are tons of experts and plenty of auxiliary software available. All these business rely heavily on the network effect: Their product is more attractive than the competition because of their market share.
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2) Become a sales force-driven company: Hire a bunch of sales people and make them convince people to buy our software. This is even more enterprisey thinking. Side step the actual users, the developers, and go straight to management with steak and strippers. I’ve worked at sales force-driven software companies and they suck. The sales people will invariably promise more than you have and drive you even deeper into “build everything for everyone”.
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Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?
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Then I came across a quote from Geoffrey Moore, who is best known for his best-selling book Crossing the Chasm, which is about how businesses cross over from their initial niche markets to dominate larger markets. In another book, called Inside the Tornado, Moore writes about the great battle between Oracle and Ingres in the early 1980s. The winner of that battle is well known: Oracle now has a market cap of more than $100 billion, and I'll bet you've never heard of Ingres.
"What set Oracle apart from Ingres," Moore writes, "was that [CEO] Larry Ellison drove for 100 percent growth while Ingres 'accepted' 50 percent growth." Executives at Ingres meant well. According to Moore, they felt that the company "simply cannot grow any faster than 50 percent and still adequately serve our customers. No one can. Look at Oracle. They are promising anything and everything and shipping little or nothing. Everybody knows it. Their customers hate them. They are going to hit the wall."
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It's entirely possible. Think of it this way: If you're growing at 50 percent a year, and your competitor is growing at 100 percent a year, it takes only eight years before your competitor is 10 times bigger than you. And when it's 10 times bigger than you, it can buy 10 times as much advertising and do 10 times as many projects and have meetings with 10 times as many customers. And you begin to disappear.
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Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years
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Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
韩国3G启示录:开放心态有助于成功_通讯与电讯_科技时代_新浪网
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在这个问题上,SK电讯也犯了想当然的错误。几乎所有的移动运营商都认为,既然在2G时代高端商务用户每个月交的电话费最多,到了3G时代他们肯定也会是首批尝鲜者。SK电讯一开始也是这么想的,但是他们很快就发现自己错了。真正对3G感兴趣的反而是年轻人,正因为他们无所事事,所以有更为充足的时间和热情去尝试新事物,而忙于工作的高端商务人群一开始对3G并不感兴趣。
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“June”的成功使得韩国的几大运营商都发现了年轻人这座“金矿”。如今,韩国的三家移动运营商SK电讯、KTF和LG电信都推出了3G子品牌,而且都竭尽全力地讨好年轻人:KTF的3G子品牌“SHOW”里面的字母“O”打扮得像快进键一样,LG电信的“OZ”则是一副全红。
CEO康培凯:iPhone是诺基亚的叫醒电话_通讯与电讯_科技时代_新浪网
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如今,同样的故事再次上演,只是这一次,主角变成了诺基亚。在昔日的竞争对手摩托罗拉陷入危机之后,诺基亚却走上了一条漫无目的的产品浅层升级之路。从N73到N96,诺基亚推出N系列的速度越来越快,但技术和外观的改进却越来越少。
Apple - MacBook - Features of the $999 MacBook.
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The moment you open your new MacBook, its glossy LED-backlit display greets you with glorious, full-screen brightness and brings your photos, movies, and presentations alive with
中国企业家:史玉柱“过坎”_互联网_科技时代_新浪网
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“这个魔咒是存在的。”史玉柱承认,“一个产品成功之后,同一个团队做第二个产品往往都不怎么成功。”
不仅是在互联网行业,史玉柱所熟知的保健品行业,这一规律也同样具有魔力。太太口服液很成功,但这家公司后面推的几十个产品全部没能再续辉煌。昂立一号也很成功,后面推的昂立所有的系列也都失败。
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史玉柱如此理解这一魔咒。“第一个产品成功,第二个产品(在判断上)可能就武断了。这种情况是很容易发生的。细节不可能像做第一个那么完美。背水一战、提心吊胆,可能没有这种情况了。所以,第一次成功往往会成为第二次的包袱。”
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Sean Parker’s Rise of Facebook And Twitter, Fall Of Google Presentation (Full Slide Deck)
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He doesn’t characterize value of “information services” very well. The core value isn’t the collection and processing of information–that is relatively easy. The core value is making available the right information when/where needed to make the right decision, etc. It’s not a total sum game where one must defeat the other; they can be complementary and exist in parallel. Both can continue to grow in value. There’s still a lot of growth to information services and it will transform over time. To ignore it would be short-sighted.
Sean Parker: Twitter/Facebook Will Soon Dominate The Web — Not Google.
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Why? Parker believes we’re shifting from the first phase of the Internet, which was dominated by what he calls “information services” These are companies like Google and Yahoo. But next up to dominate the web will be the “network services” like Facebook and Twitter, he believes.
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He went on to say that Friendster was not a fad, it failed because of the failure to scale, not because of poor product execution. So how did MySpace fall? It was a “systematic product failure,” said Parker. And Facebook was smart to launch with the college campus networks. “College students didn’t have MySpace accounts, so we went for them,” Parker said. It was all about tightly spun networks at colleges, and that helped Facebook spread naturally and virally.
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Excitement For Hardware Keeps Sergey Brin Up At Night. And Maybe Chrome For Mac Too.
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SB: I think they’re just tying Google with change. The world is changing, the business models are changing. They’re making a leap that we’re causing that or we’re stealing from them, I think. I don’t agree with the conclusion, but I hear the pain.
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SB: Yeah thanks for that question. I’ve been surprised about the controversy there. We want to make books available on a huge scale. We overcame tech challenges. We had to overcome the legal dispute, which we’re working on. These books have great content, even if they’re 50 years old. People need to access them and we need to pay them for that, we know that. I’m surprised by the resistance. But I’m optimistic that we’ll be successful and that we’ll provide access to tens of millions of books.
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