Sundar. You might not like Zuck's vision but he has a vision. Sundar has a vision too which is that he can freeze things just like it is forever but that's really a choice to die.

Conservatism is a better fit for Microsoft because their users have "Who moved my cheese?" as a motto. Microsoft also mostly gets paid by its users through some circuitous path, Google's ad based model has dangerous conflicts of interests built into it quite fundamentally.

I lately read this Wikipedia article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

and really appreciated its viewpoint but I am wondering if in the long term it is going to be another scenario like

https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chan...

that is, so far we haven't seen platforms that have decayed suffering from it but there has to be some limit at which customers are so frustrated that the two sided market is broken and my guess is that when that happens a company like Google will go from "bad to nonexistent" in "internet time".

The "no going back to combustion for mobility" is already passed, and Tesla only sped the transition up slightly. The real cause is a 7%/year improvement in battery tech.

Don't believe me? Pick up https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chan..., and read the chapter on electric cars. Starting with the first edition back in the 1990s, it correctly stated that 2020 would be about when mass market electric vehicles would start to make economic sense, and the transition would be inevitable a few years after that. Tesla was only slightly early to that party, and now basically every car company has acknowledged that electric is the future.

That's how you and I think and it is how the Finnish and Japanese game makers think but it is not how Activision, Ubisoft, and EA think. At this point they've decided to disinvest in their legacy games. They are are intensely envious of the success of Genshin Impact which achieves AAA graphics and gameplay on mobile but they can't replicate its success because they are too afraid to take risks.

Despite the fact that mobile phones (ex. Apple) have not been improving since 2017 there is a perception of inevitability in the industry that phones will eat absolutely everything. They figure game addicts will switch to mobile games when their old hardware breaks down and they don't have a choice. (... they'll keep playing the same old games, the main thing you need is a decent game controller for mobile, there has to be an interesting story of why every company other than a big console manufacturer struggles to make game controllers that work -- look at the failures of Logitech, Steam, Google, etc.)

Clayton Christensen wrote this influential book

https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chan...

which may have been a bit too influential. He made the case that firms in industry after industry went under because they failed to invest in new technology because the new technology was not, at first, good enough to satisfy their legacy customers.

What we see now (Microsoft releasing a tablet OS for PCs in Windows 8, Facebook neglecting a very good monopoly business for dreams of virtual reality, ...) is firms frequently throwing their current customers under the bus in the name of what might be... Because they read that book and don't want to wind up like one of the case studies.

As it is now it is a form of corporate suicide and we are waiting for it to play out and have a B-school professor write a book about it. But when you look at this way many of the things that make no sense in gaming like GAME PASS and the many me too game streaming services are part of the strange spectacle of a game industry that is failing despite still-rising revenues. It's hard, for instance, to picture Nintendo coming out with a real sequel to the Switch for many reasons (e.g. they could make a console 4x as powerful... that costs 4x as much; who needs better platforms when you are just rehashing Diablo for the n-th time and CS:GO is still a leading game?)

It's enough to make me think I should quit playing games, go out for walk or pet a puppy or make some friends! Maybe more people will the way the industry is heading.

they created a market and it's economics and now they're being attacked by the next generation of market entrants who've structured their businesses to _specifically_ attack those economics

https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chan...

Let's say the OP is correct. It doesn't matter — Whomever is using the word is using it how they want to and the recipient will understand the correct and incorrect meaning. If I was the CTO at a bank and I told the OP we were building a private blockchain for asset management, he would know what I mean. Now since the op is technical, he would probably ask more questions to figure out that what I really want is an openly audit-able immutable database, but his intellect would allow him to drill down further.

This fallacy the same thing that happened for the word "Disrupt"/"Disruption"/"Disruptive Technology". Even Clay Christensen, the creator of the phrase, says most people misuse the phrase "disruption" when compared to his explanation in the Innovators Dilemma[1]. There are Tons[2] of[3] people[3] complaining that the term is misused. In the end, if you casually tell someone you've got an idea for a Taco Food truck that's going to disrupt the food truck industry, people will know what you mean.

The definition of this word "blockchain" is being misused so much that it is changing faster real eduction can help. I think posts like this are great if you're technical, but as I said above — It doesn't matter what the fallacy is.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chan...

[2] - https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/16/the-truth-about-disruption...

[3] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/vukivujasinovic/2017/03/02/its-...

[4] - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption...

For anyone interested in reading more about this, Clayton Christensen covers this area in The Innovators Dilemma.

https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chan...

The Innovator's Dilemma:

http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chang...

Well, The Facebook company can feel rather juvenile to deal with. Some of their decisions in dealing with other businesses sometimes feel like they are being made by fifteen year old kids with no life or business experience.

In terms of the Facebook product one cannot deny the obvious: They touched THE nerve on the internet. World wide. Across languages and cultures.

I don't like the embodiment of the product at all. At the very least it has usability and privacy problems. Yet more people use it successfully than any other web app in the world. So, what do I know? What do experts know?

A similar thing could be said about CraigsList. It's 2014. Every time I use the site I cannot believe what I am looking at. Yet I and lots of other people keep using it. It works.

Facebook has a general lack of elegance (whatever that means). The kind that happens when a product is thrown together and evolved over time. Evolving anything over time means the output "naturally selects" (subverting the theory here) to the environment created by it's users.

They survive because they optimized for what is important to their users. Grandma couldn't care less about UI issues or searchability. She wants to see her grandchildren's pictures and videos. And for that it works very well for a huge percentage of the planet.

At some point it becomes almost impossible to break the mold and clean-up what might be less than ideal. Why would you? It works. Another "Innovator's Dilemma" [1] situation to a large extent.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-B...

I agree with the vast majority of your points. Didn't even bother to look at the broken-telephone links. Why bother.

What you are talking about sound very much like what's covered in The Innovator's Dilema [0].

I am not entirely sure I understand your position with regards to government. It seems you are suggesting the only way to evolve things is to "exit". I took this as perhaps going to the extent of physically relocating to a country where what you want is either accepted or already there. You gave the example of your parents. As the son of immigrants I too have similar examples. Can you clarify this point?

There's a huge divide between Washington's understanding of the ever-evolving world of technology and that reality. Watching the various layers of Washington discuss what they perceive to be the issue with the ACA website is proof enough of that.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-B...

This turns out to be a key component of Clay Christensen's original theory of "disruptive technology" (before it became a buzzword.) The theory is that the disruption comes in part because existing producers ignore the new technology, since initially it is only of use to a tiny niche in the market that doesn't care about performance. The niche is left to bit players, but it turns out to provide them enough oxygen that they can invest in R&D and improve the technology, eventually to the point that it's the best choice for all but the highest-end applications.

http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chang...

Few points:

1. I don't believe it's an accurate statement to say Nokia is dead (if even as a stand-alone company). They have several great things going for them today, it's just hard to see if you're not looking beyond the current quarter or two (which I've found is a common symptom of blindness).

2. I don't believe it's an accurate statement to say they flushed every piece of software they have ever built down the toilet. Firstly, they're still releasing non-WP phones. Secondly, a lot of their skills are in innovating within hardware, which they're very much still doing great stuff with.

3. The takeaway from the article is that if you are a tech company, you shouldn't become a media company (or get into media). Firstly, wouldn't Apple, Google, and Microsoft have never entered the media industry if they would've followed this? Secondly, this takeaway is a great example of the innovators dilemma [1]. The two opposing strategies could just as well lead to failure -- a. Following this "takeaway" advice and being too afraid to join new "value markets" (e.g. innovating within media), and so you just keep on running with what works [3a]; and b. Not following this takeaway advice because you realize you can't stay on top forever with your current strategy, and so you make an attempt to enter new disruptive markets even if it means cannibalizing yourself [3b].

[3a] I think this blanket advice has problems -- media may have been a good thing to get into because the media integration could have caused (or did?) a major disruption in the existing market (I believe this was Nokia's belief and a cause for why they did what they did). Thus not trying new things like this could cause failure as well, as new players enter the market and take their marketshare (e.g. Apple with music and media at its core).

[3b] Though Nokia failed at it.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-B...

If this is true, then he (Craig Newmark) really needs to read the innovator's dilemma (http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-B...). TLDR: If you allow yourself to become a prisoner to your success, you're actually making your continued success unlikely. You can solve the dilemma by spinning out a smaller, irreverant version of yourself & giving them what they need to destroy the old company.

In craigslist's case, he could include a link on the old site that allows users to upgrade to a more modern version, and have the modern site basically consume an api/scrape the old CL till it gained momentum.

"What I don't understand, is why Google never attempted to enter new markets with different business models"

Google has always been attempting to enter new markets, but the new attempts amounted to a lot of moderately useful utilities, some questionably useful toys and curiosities, and a lot of misses. Mostly, the attempts seemed like random offshoots -- the products of a company that was supremely dominant in its position, flush with cash, and free to experiment in any way it so chose.

As I mentioned in a previous comment, it's very easy in hindsight to blame Google for having essentially rested on its laurels, squandering its lead and its position. And it's very easy to claim that certain threats (i.e., Facebook) were "always" obvious. They weren't. There were certainly some critical junctures at which Google should have focused its efforts on expansion in one or two directions. But Google was making attempts at expansion -- just not the right ones.

Harvard's Clayton Christensen famously described this situation as "The Innovator's Dilemma." There is a well-documented and almost axiomatic pattern, throughout history, of innovative companies rising to the top and then failing to predict who or what would eventually disrupt them. (If disruption were easily predictable, after all, it wouldn't be disruptive).

http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-B...

It's worth checking out.