Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Re:Is the Lean Startup Dead? by sandworm101 on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @11:25AM (#17918817)

Disruption doesn't come from direct competition. Writing another web browser isn't going to disrupt the market for web browsers. You need a new concept in how we access web-type material. That would disrupt, and wouldn't need much code. Look at Napster et al. They weren't massive but still disrupted the music industry.

The gaming industry still has room for lone coders to make a difference. Many of the top indi games are/were written by individuals (KSP, Minecraft) or by very small groups (Factorio). Sometimes being able to do something leaner, with less code, means you can win ground against the biggest of big guys (City Skylines over SimCity).

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Re:Is the Lean Startup Dead? by simias on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @12:19PM (#17919356)

> Disruption doesn't come from direct competition. Writing another web browser isn't going to disrupt the market for web browsers. You need a new concept in how we access web-type material. That would disrupt, and wouldn't need much code. Look at Napster et al. They weren't massive but still disrupted the music industry.

Sure but my point is more general: if I create a new lean web-like protocol and client and it can't display videos, feature interactive content, arbitrary styles etc... How do I drive adoption?

I can convince the suckless folks that "less is more" and that it's "the unix way" but outside of that circle I'm not sure who's going to use my software.

All software seems to be going in the opposite direction. For instance I'm a heavy user of IRC, these days the type of communities you could find on QuakeNet 15 years ago are on Discord, a super heavy webchat client that manages to slow down my beefy desktop computer when run on pre-quantom Firefox. The Discord client is probably several times heavier on resource usage than the Quake game itself!

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Re:Is the Lean Startup Dead? by jerrre on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @12:43PM (#17919610)

Disruption wont come from yet-another-browser, and of course surely it won't come from yet-another-browser-with-less-features

It might come from a piece of software that solves a problem for some group of people that a browser can't, and then evolving towards the mainstream replacing the role that browsers have right now making them obsolete

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Re:Is the Lean Startup Dead? by sandworm101 on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @12:41PM (#17919584)

I hate when my phone wastes my time loading junk. A browser that couldn't even try, that couldn't be tricked into doing so, would find a market imho.

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Re:Is the Lean Startup Dead? by kurtiswhite on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @02:25PM (#17920643)

The Brave browser (https://brave.com/) is an attempt to do exactly that.

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Re:Is the Lean Startup Dead? by throwaway080383 on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @12:00PM (#17919137)

Heck, both DotA and Counter-Strike began life as user-made mods on existing games, and their relevancy has far outlived those of the base games.

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Re:Is the Lean Startup Dead? by snaky on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @08:05PM (#17922925)

> Writing another web browser isn't going to disrupt the market for web browsers

It depends. You could say the same to Igor Sysoev when he started to write Nginx, for example.

So, e.g. web browser with all the main Chrome or Firefox functions but working 2x faster on mobile and eating 3x less memory would disrupt the browser market indeed.

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Re:Is the Lean Startup Dead? by xixixao on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @01:03PM (#17919867)

Love both gaming examples, but you’re proving OP’s point. Those are very specifically technologically limited games (ie not requiring the same resources as AAA games). Disruption is possible, but the complexity argument stands.

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