Re:Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?
by nostrademons on Monday April 16, 2007 @04:00PM
(#13374)
Search is a business with notoriously small lock-in and network effects. Eric Schmidt comments on this all the time, it's a significant risk factor for Google.
Brand loyalty is a cumulative advantage, but it's pretty fickle. Customers will stick with a trusted brand as long as they continue to trust it, but all it takes is one or two screwups or a competitor coming out with a noticeably better product, and your brand evaporates.
I first used Google in 1999, and it was much better than the existing search engines. Not a little better, not even just noticeably better, but orders of magnitude better. I could immediately find results that I'd previously have to dig through 10 pages of links for.
They may not have that advantage now, but I don't care. Google is good enough. Until someone comes out with a search engine that's noticeably better, I'm not going to switch. I've already got my Firefox toolbar setup, and my habits - I see no reason to reevaluate them until there's clear evidence that I can do better.
Google almost pulled off the same thing with GMail, but Yahoo and Microsoft stopped them. When GMail came out, it was orders of magnitude better than the existing webmail solutions. It gave you 1GB of space instead of 4MB, it had Google search integrated, and it had a clean AJAX UI. Like many early adopters, I switched as soon as I could get my hands on an invite (you only got 1 or 2 back then), and have since made GMail my default e-mail client. But it didn't completely penetrate the mass market, because Y!Mail and Hotmail immediately upped their storage space to 400+ MB, and Yahoo came out with a new UI. IMHO, GMail is still better, but it's no longer an order of magnitude better, so people who are just getting GMail invites now often choose to stick with their existing e-mail.
Brand loyalty is a cumulative advantage, but it's pretty fickle. Customers will stick with a trusted brand as long as they continue to trust it, but all it takes is one or two screwups or a competitor coming out with a noticeably better product, and your brand evaporates.
I first used Google in 1999, and it was much better than the existing search engines. Not a little better, not even just noticeably better, but orders of magnitude better. I could immediately find results that I'd previously have to dig through 10 pages of links for.
They may not have that advantage now, but I don't care. Google is good enough. Until someone comes out with a search engine that's noticeably better, I'm not going to switch. I've already got my Firefox toolbar setup, and my habits - I see no reason to reevaluate them until there's clear evidence that I can do better.
Google almost pulled off the same thing with GMail, but Yahoo and Microsoft stopped them. When GMail came out, it was orders of magnitude better than the existing webmail solutions. It gave you 1GB of space instead of 4MB, it had Google search integrated, and it had a clean AJAX UI. Like many early adopters, I switched as soon as I could get my hands on an invite (you only got 1 or 2 back then), and have since made GMail my default e-mail client. But it didn't completely penetrate the mass market, because Y!Mail and Hotmail immediately upped their storage space to 400+ MB, and Yahoo came out with a new UI. IMHO, GMail is still better, but it's no longer an order of magnitude better, so people who are just getting GMail invites now often choose to stick with their existing e-mail.