> Medium makes it really easy to post something that looks good across devices etc., and has good sharing integration. That's all.

You say that as though it's easy to do these things...

No, I'm not saying it's easy, just that doing something very well isn't particularly innovative.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking down Medium's product - it's fantastic. But the OP claimed that Medium has "unambiguously, objectively succeeded" in being innovative, and I just don't see it. I'd actually argue that Tumblr was far more innovative - there are some fascinating forms of content that came out of that place, not to mention the whole social network, reblogging effect, etc. etc.

But neither has shaped up to be a particularly successful business, and placing perceived innovation above that might not be wise when you're talking about user generated content. What happens if either of them fails?

Yeah but it's not that hard either if you have the resources. Now we see, though, that the cost of doing it has so far exceeded the return.

Easy? It's beyond easy. It's trivial.

> Medium makes it really easy to post something that looks good across devices etc., and has good sharing integration. That's all.

That's... not an easy thing to do. Making anything to do with technology "easy" is no small feat; that Medium was able to do this with as big an incumbent player as WordPress (for example) is an even bigger feat.

>That's... not an easy thing to do.

Offering something easy to post that's looking good across devices?

Gimme a break, they have a single basic template, and minimal authoring tools. With these constraints, there are literally tens of thousands of Wordpress, Ghost and vanilla HTML templates by various developers/designers with 1/1000 the resources of Medium that look just as good across devices.

Well they did that by basically limiting what the user can do. The editing options were extremely limited. There was also no customisation until recently. They built a basic-function responsive blog platform. How is that hard?

It's very hard to tell people to use your software that has 1/100th of features of the incumbents but it's done better. Apple did it with iPhone for instance, but normally startups die trying.

That's because the iPhone didn't have 1/100 the features of competitors -- it had 80/100 of the features, but focused on the 80% that mattered (no "fm radio" or "mobile flash" for example).

Imho that was mostly achieved by marketing , not technical innovation (which they claim)

Also helps a lot with the amount of connections Ev Williams and co have. I would guess that having all the right connections was a huge part of Medium's success, especially really early on. With enough connections you can grow (almost) any half-decent service.

hard != innovative, was OP's point.

OTOH, solving well-established hard problems sometime requires more true innovation than developing new ideas. I prefer to do both.