Comment by biocomputation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by biocomputation | Hacker News Reader

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> You should give motivational speeches in SV.

> https://imgur.com/gallery/eMZCONp

> /be

But it's been, what, 10 months since Brave launched?

http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/20/brave-browser/

The Wikipedia article on browser market share doesn't even list Brave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

According to StatCounter, 'other' browsers constitute 12% of the market.

http://gs.statcounter.com/

Brave isn't listed, and I assume that it would be in 'other'. I wonder how much share it has?

According to Google Play store, Brave has 50-100K installs.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow...

Whereas Chrome has 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 installs.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.ch...

In a few months it'll have been a year since Brave launched and it basically has no users as far as I can see. I don't know a single person who uses it. This thread on HN is the only place I've ever seen anyone talk about Brave.

I feel like my original remarks in this thread are entirely on point.

10 months? What is the official standard timeline for success? And let's say a venture doesn't succeed eventually; does that make it not worth the effort? By that standard, the best venture capitalists waste about 90% of their efforts.

I'm not involved in Brave and I'm certainly not the arbiter of what constitutes success for their company or their browser. My remarks above were made in the context of my original remarks, which discussed the amount of work required to succeed in conventional terms.

If you make a web browser, you need to get tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users to make a dent in the market. My original remark said that it didn't matter if Brave did anything cool if it never gained traction. I think those remarks are on point for the discussion: does it matter of Brave does amazing things if their browser ends up in the dustbin of history? Awesomeness in Brave won't matter if it doesn't get market share because it without market share it won't present a competitive threat to any of the established browsers.

My reply above was just pointing out that commonly available statistics show that Brave has no real market share, but instead of presenting vacuous arguments, I provided some hard data.

I personally think it would be wonderful if Brave was a huge success. I don't believe that any single company ( Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook ) should have so much dominance over search, mobile, browser, social etc. It's not good for consumers and the almost unchallenged dominance of a small group of companies is turning into an utter disaster for the Internet.

> it didn't matter if Brave did anything cool if it never gained traction

With due respect, I don't agree even with that.

Technologies, knowledge, and people live on, even after a particular business or product goes away: Opera has never gained much market share but their ideas have - you probably use them every day in your browser. Brave could change directions and focus on part of its portfolio, maybe a micropayments system independent of a browser. Maybe Google, Mozilla, Apple, or some advertising or payment company will use Brave's ideas, acquire Brave, or hire their employees. Some Brave employees could go on to start another company, taking the knowledge and tech they developed, and the lessons they learned from Brave's successes and failures - just like Netscape employees went on to found Mozilla. Others trying to similar things also will learn from Brave. The failure of one particular product is often only the first step. (And that's only if Brave's browser never gains market share; it's much too soon to tell.)

Big things start small. Take your comments and s/Brave/Phoenix/ in 2002 into 2003. You were right at the time, wrong within another year.

Could Brave fail? Of course. Has it? Not yet, we're pre-1.0 still. We are growing and we've started ramping toward 1.0 since mobile browsers are post-1.0 by store version rules, and growing even faster. We have bugs to fix before 1.0 and the push to take laptop/desktop share.

The way to think about Brave or any early-stage effort against incumbents is not short-term static analysis. Markets leave equilibrium, macro trends as well as errors force out players. Incumbents do fall. Study how they fall, look for their weaknesses -- especially their essential business conflicts of interest.

Those business weaknesses can be attacked more vigorously, and over longer timescales, than any particular technological weakness.

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