Hacker News Reader

Comment by tanilama | Hacker News Reader

If your core feature can be easily copied by your competitors, is that an advantage to start with?

Only if one of your competitor is Facebook. They have over 2b users

Well, FB is there for a long time, so the whole prospect of Snapchat relies on that Facebook shows mercy not to copy their feature? That sounds like a horrible business to begin with.

When FB, Google, Amazon, Microsoft are all worth several hundred billion how much room is left to not get copied?

Seems like the best you are hoping for is that you end up entrenched before they react (like twitch vs youtube).

That is the point, investors, and engineers alike should be wary of such companies whose foundation seat on sand.

And I don't really understand when Twitter has set a bad precedent for social media companies, why people still bet on Snapchat. Weird choice.

Well FB was once in the same spot.

But no one tried to rip them off like they are doing it now. Google took their own approach to social and failed.

Google never cared about winning social. They wanted people to get Google+ accounts and fill in more demographic data about themselves that could add value to their advertising offerings. Being that now you pretty much have to have such an account to use Google services, and people are likely to at least fill out some of the information - I'm betting they don't consider it a failure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com