Comment by mrkurt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrkurt | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Positioning yourself as "the anti-big-evil-guy" can work really well when you're the little guy. It would be stupid of them not to run with it when it's resonating so well. It doesn't really matter what challenges they face, the story for users is what matters.

The Myspace to Facebook example is funny, because Facebook was the anti Myspace. Not only that, they were the anti Myspace specifically because they stripped out features.

Many successful companies were the anti-something or another when they were small:

* Google was the anti-Yahoo

* 37 Signals was the anti-enterprise (and lately, the anti-funded startup)

* Southwest Airlines is the anti-American Airlines, don't you love their free baggage commercials?

* Reddit is the anti-digg

I commented below with a proper answer (or my attempt at it) but basically, in each of those situations they are actual competitiors. You could replace Yahoo with google, Reddit with Digg, but you can't replace Paypal with WePay. To me at least it seems like they're school yard bullies, identified a "weak" target, one that everyone dislikes and then using that dislike to improve their own position without actually competing. It's the cheats way and for me at least, I wouldn't be happy running a business that way. If I'm going to spend my time bitching about a competitor, I'd make damn sure that I was actually a competitor.

I dunno, I don't think that's true. You can replace the search function of Yahoo with Google, but that was only one of a bunch of things Yahoo was doing. You can't fly Southwest Airlines to Tokyo, but you can on American.

As a matter of fact, Southwest Airlines limited service reach makes many of the things they tout possible. AA could never, for instance, operate with only one kind of airplane.

People love the underdog. You might think of big bad Paypal as being the weak target, but I don't think anyone else does.

Salesforce.com was "The End of Software."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com