In Silicon Valley Now, It. Yesterday, though, a mere fifteen months later, Sidecar. But I want to focus on what Branson, a self- made billionaire, who is more often right than wrong, said about ride- sharing not being a “winner- takes- all. What Branson says is generally true for companies that sell analog products, such as packaged goods or soda, or analog services, such as air travel. Coke isn’t going to drive Pepsi out of business, and Toyota isn’t going to eliminate Honda. Most competition in Silicon Valley now heads toward there being one monopolistic winner. ABBA - The Winner Takes It All (1980). Audio-CD-Sound zu Video-Material aus TV-Show. And that is why it is hard not to see that, right now, the only competition that matters in ride- sharing is between the two largest companies: Uber and Lyft. In the course of nearly two decades of closely following (and writing about) Silicon Valley, I have seen products and markets go through three distinct phases. The first is when there is a new idea, product, service, or technology dreamed up by a clever person or group of people. For a brief while, that idea becomes popular, which leads to the emergence of dozens of imitators, funded in part by the venture community. Most of these companies die. When the dust settles, there are one or two or three players left standing. Watch the video, get the download or listen to ABBA – The Winner Takes It All for free. The Winner Takes It All appears on the album Gold: Greatest Hits. The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us . Disney chairman Michael Eisner topped the 1993. Lyrics to 'The Winner Takes It All' by ABBA: But tell me does she kiss Like I used to kiss you? Does it feel the same When she calls your name? Released as the first single from the group's Super Trouper album on 21 July 1980, it is a ballad in the key of F-sharp major, reflecting the end of a. What is a 'Winner-Takes-All Market' A winner-takes-all market is a market in which the best performers are able to capture a very large share of the rewards, and the remaining competitors are left with very little. Rarely do you end up with true competition. In 1. 99. 8, when Google was born, search was a competitive market with one clear leader, Yahoo, which had identified the need for a Web directory. Others, such as Infoseek, Lycos, and Excite, were falling behind. So the only way to beat Yahoo. They correctly identified that the Web was going to grow exponentially, in size, scope, and usage. Music video by Abba performing The Winner Takes It All. It would need a new, faster, simpler search engine that would update as quickly as the Web itself. And they would make it super fast. It was a perfect behavior for a world that was going slowly from dial- up Internet to always- on broadband connections. Of course, to make this happen, they would need to build and own their own infrastructure, from networks to data centers to servers. As Google started to grow, its new, more algorithmic approach to search attracted new competitors. Another was a company called Powerset, which ended up getting acquired by Microsoft and eventually became a core part of what is now Microsoft Bing, which currently runs a distant second in the search- engine sweepstakes. Looking back, Google. But it also came about because of the new reality of the Internet: a lot of services were going to be algorithmic, and owning your own infrastructure would be a key advantage. As Google got more money, it built better infrastructure, which allowed the company to serve up results more and more quickly, in the process training hundreds of millions of people to use Google whenever they wanted to search. The more people searched, the more data they gave Google to make its index better, smarter, faster, and, eventually, more personal. In short: as Google got bigger, it got better, which made it bigger still. Google is a winner that has taken it all. This loop of algorithms, infrastructure, and data is potent. Add what are called network effects to the mix, and you start to see virtual monopolies emerge almost overnight. A network effect occurs when the value of a product or service goes up with the number of people using it. The Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe called it Metcalfe. Telephone services, e. Bay, and Skype are good examples of the network effects at work. The more people who are on Skype, the more people you can call, and thus the more likely it is that someone will join. While in the early days of networks, growth was limited by slowness and cost at numerous points. Facebook, which historically was one of the main beneficiaries of network effects (a social network becomes more valuable to you as more of your friends join it) has grown from two hundred million users to 1. And that’s not the only way that Facebook has created a near monopoly in social networking. In the past decade, it has ramped up spending on new data centers, hired a lot more engineers, and turned its news feed into a powerful algorithm. The more we use it, the more data we give the company, and the more it is able to control where we turn our attention. The company has more than a billion users around the world, and it has figured out how to become a dominant source of our mobile addiction. Facebook, thanks to this loop of algorithms, infrastructure, money, and data, is a winner- takes- all company. Twitter is a distant second in the social web, about a fourth of the size of its rival down Highway 1. And now Uber is building this tight loop of algorithms, infrastructure, and data, too. In June, 2. 01. 4, in a column for Fast Company magazine, I pointed out that Google and Uber aren. If serving up instant search results was Google. The faster the car gets there, the less likely you are to think about Lyft or Flywheel or anyone else. So far, it’s become pretty fast, which is why you probably never thought about Sidecar. Uber has also learned from Facebook: raise a lot of money and use it as a competitive advantage. Because Uber has raised about twelve billion dollars from investors, it has been able to flood markets around the world with Ubers. The more Ubers on the road, the more people are likely to use them. The faster they arrive to pick us up, the more we will forget about other modes of transportation. And the more we use them, the more data we give to Uber, which can then tweak their algorithms to optimize fleet usage and traffic routes. You start to see why food delivery and courier services are now part of Uber. What was, at one time, an idea for an app to hail limousines for party- goers is now a company that is reimagining all kinds of transportation. Meanwhile, Amazon has run away with online retail, leaving everyone else to fight over scraps. Microsoft, even today, controls the office- productivity business. Eight years into the smartphone boom, Google. There are two companies that dominate the public cloud. There are some competitive markets, such as mobile payments, where Square, Pay. Pal, Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay, and Walmart Pay are some of the bigger players. But, if I were a betting person, I’d wager that this, too, will become a battle between two or three companies. Perhaps that is why it isn. We have seen companies such as Ride. Pal and Leap Transit go under already. And we will see more failures on this road to transportation reinvention. Google, Facebook, and, perhaps, Uber are indicators of something bigger: in our connected age, data, infrastructure, and algorithms give companies a distinct advantage. With all due respect to Branson, it is a winner- takes- all world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2017
Categories |