01
Oct
07

Breaking News: Competition is a Good Thing

This post doesn’t specifically apply to Lypp so much as it does to anyone launching a new service or product in the technology arena.

Many of us use our relationships in the blogging community to get the word out, and it’s always great when there is positive coverage of our stories. It helps reach an early adopter audience and does so far more efficiently than navigating the intricacies of old media.

It’s understandable that the focus of bloggers is often breaking a story and finding the next new thing, but the reality is that almost all technology is deployed within existing paradigms and seeks to compete with, umm, competitors. The level of analysis in many blog posts and in the comments that follow, however, is often as simple as ‘it won’t succeed because company x is already doing something similar and for less money’. And in fact real analysis of the dynamics of the respective industries and market segments is abandoned at the expense of finding what’s first rather than what will actually work.

Step back from the world of start-ups and passionate innovation for a second, and into the larger world of mature markets and their very different dynamics. Successful companies are about execution and while sometimes they shift the paradigm and transform the market, more often they combine incremental benefits provided by smart technology with operational excellence.

I’ve witnessed these dynamics in the blogosphere recently with respect to our friends at Cubic Telecom. These guys are of course innovators par excellence, but I believe the success of MaxRoam is going to come mostly from deep industry knowledge of distribution, product management and what really works and what really doesn’t work. Pat Phelan called on his blog for a ‘living room’ policy, by which he means the need for maturity and civility in the comments made primarily by anonymous commenters on blogs. Sadly this change is not likely any time soon, but in a way I think the real transformation should be at the publisher level.

That is those who write about new technology and innovation need to encourage discussion of the long-term significance of the shiny new things, the climate in which this new technology is operating, and the credibility of the team seeking to execute on the idea. As unfashionable as it might seem, what I’d like to see is more good old fashioned business journalism and less ‘this would be the greatest thing since slice bread if only xyz wasn’t doing it for half a penny less.’

Few of us would say no to a wildly generous, out-of-the-blue pre-revenue or early stage exit, but smart entrepreneurs aren’t and shouldn’t be focused on that route because by definition the odds are always long. My hope isn’t so much that we can all just get along as it is that web 2.0 genuinely begins to hurt lazy, monopolistic incumbents by getting on with building real businesses in real markets. It would be nice to see more focus on that goal in the blogosphere and beyond.


0 Responses to “Breaking News: Competition is a Good Thing”


  1. No Comments

Leave a Reply