Nice post as always Greg.

To those who aren't familiar, gk1 is a regular HN commenter / contributor and excellent consultant who knows his stuff.

This piece is also a gold mine of info for those looking to grow their consulting practices:

https://www.gkogan.co/blog/consulting-advice/

(no current affiliation other than being a former client via Scalyr)

Thank you Noah! I appreciate you saying that.

I like how you don’t specify “marketing consultant” because that would kinda give the game away :)

Really great article! I think that another element driving the push to brand oneself a category-creator is the ego factor. Everybody wants to consider themselves a category redefining innovation powerhouse.

in the table at the bottom, how does fastly count as a "new category"? Aren't they doing fairly typical CDN stuff?

Good observation -- you're the second person to point this out to me. (The first person said "It's basically Akamai with better DX.") That column refers to what they market, not necessarily what others think of them. Although we just think of them as a CDN, they are trying to market themselves in a new category. The dissonance shows why creating a new category takes more than just persistent marketing.

As you wrote in your article, the new category becomes "another thing that needs explaining", and Fastly doesn't explain it well.

I guess what's happening is that these companies spend a lot of time internally discussing and refining their product and their marketing, and then one day someone comes up with a term for that, and everyone agrees that that is a great way to express all that. But nobody outside the company knows what all that is, because they don't have the same background, so they're just like, what is an edge cloud?

Excellent and detailed rebuttal to the book “Play Bigger” which pushes the “make up a new category and become ‘Category King’” philosophy

Quoting from a Gartner analyst soils the article.

Whatever one says they do, what they actually always do is whatever the customer who spends the most money says. So the only meaningful information that ever comes out of Gartner is what the most money wants said.

For some people, that is useful information, just because it tells them which way to jump to stay in tune with the big money.

very interesting read, thanks for writing this, positioning in the toolbox of startups is often misunderstood and this helps a lot to put it into context

great article to point to in the future

Presenting the communications-focused smartphones of old the consumption-focused smartphones of today together as categorical equivalents seems like a failure of language. That was the disruption.

The point is that both were called smartphones.

So... something that's very different from what's already out there isn't a new category, because it's using an old name. But something that is just like what's out there already but has a new name isn't a new category either.

New products and new markets are popping up all the time. They don't come into existence fully formed like Athena, and they may keep the name of what they evolved from, but they are very different. My "smart phone" isn't a phone, it's a handheld computer that includes a phone as a minor function. I use my "phone" as a phone about as often as I use my "computer" for computation.

Makes me wish I was European enough to be able to call it my “handy” (as in handheld computer) and have anyone take me seriously.