Netflix streaming killed Netflix by mail.

not totally killed; you can still do it!

Was streaming cheaper? Or rather didn't streaming have higher margins?

No. The Netflix mail business was very significantly profitable and the streaming business was losing a ton of money for years. The mail business carried, paid for, the streaming business.

That's because of the the entirely different business model of the disc rental business (first sale doctrine) vs streaming licensing business (you're screwed, the content owners will squeeze you to the wall). The horrible licensing costs of the streaming business is what prompted Netflix to push into production (basically direct those fees equivalent into assets they'd own outright instead of paying all their revenue back out to licensing fees forever).

The horrible streaming licensing cost problem is why Spotify struggles to earn a decent profit despite how much they've grown and having a zillion subscribers. You get no benefit of scale on your margin, because the content owners always squeeze you as you grow.

Spotify is up to $8.6b in revenue and still losing money. Their business has no margin at all, and that's essentially all due to the music licensing costs. That's why they're desperate to push into anything else, other lines of business, where they can not have to pay all their revenue out in licensing fees.

Makes sense..

iPhone killed the iPad.

Netflix streaming killed Netflix DVDs-by-mail.

Azure-cross-platform-support-is-king is sort-of killing Windows-only-tools.

It's still super hard to do, but every CEO post-2000 has read the innovator's dilemma and you can see that in their actions.

>iPhone killed the iPad. I think you meant iPod here.

Both would apply. The iPod in the late 2000s and somewhat later the iPhone got bigger screens and killed the iPad craze.

Maybe google does something like this, with their myriad services? but then everyone complains about them constantly killing off products

No they just fracture and kill markets.

They don't have a cohesive long term strategy. They do have the capability to disrupt with internal innovation.

Many have tried .... no one has succeeded because internal venture innovation is hard.

>internal venture innovation is hard.

Only CEOs. Which are mostly stuck with politics. Founders tends to have it easier. But that is assuming they see it coming.

Any day now Google Allo, Hangouts, Talk, Chat, Plus, Wave, Messages, Voice, Duo, Meet will displace Facebook Messenger/WhatsApp! Just you wait!!!

Apple's products regularly cannibalize themselves.

Intel transition from NAND to Chip.

Google had a relatively good chat product, Google Talk. Then they invented Google Hangouts, Google+, Wave, Allo, Messenger, Meet, and Chat.

Now IRC is dead. Who gets the last laugh, huh?!

You could also argue that Google tried to reinvent Skype, Slack, Discord, and a million other chat apps, and they cannibalized their own offerings because they were feckless and mercurial.

Yeah, and also cuz they kinda sucked. 1st-gen iMessage, or even old-school Trillian, was loads better than Google's graveyard of shitty chat products.

Google had no overarching chat strategy, just threw gobs of money and different teams at reinventing different spokes of the wheels, never thinking about the cart as a whole.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Also: please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. We're trying for a different sort of site here.

Google Talk evolved into Hangouts which then evolved into Chat. It's all one continuous line with a terrible marketing strategy. From what I can tell, Meet seems to be just a confusing way to access Hangouts video chats.

"Evolve" here meant removing compatibility with xmpp clients AND losing all chat history.

Chat history matter a lot, really.

I can still see all of my Talk/Hangouts/Chat history going back years. Removing XMPP sucks, and I was annoyed by that too, but the chat history is still there.

The grizzled IRC veterans. We are finally free of the deluge of clueless plebs.