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Comment by mcantor | Hacker News Reader

   It's also not easy for big companies to change course, add
   features, iterate, or experiment. PayPal can't simply decide
   to shift its focus toward consumers, nor would they want to.

This reminds me of an outstanding article I read some time ago which advised: "Attack your competitors' strengths, not their weaknesses." In other words, WePay might have failed if their goal was (for example) just to provide better customer service, PayPal's weakness. This is because PayPal could ostensibly improve their customer service without affecting their bottom line. Merchant-oriented services are PayPal's strength, and WePay "attacked" that strength by catering to non-merchants, which, as the article states, they could not do without a core shift in values and focus.

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I agree with all of your points, but I think it's important however to note that there have been successful entrepreneurs who have offered similar products/services as the 800 lb. gorilla and have succeeded by being better than their competition which of sometimes means improved customer service.

Taking an example from the article, when Richard Branson joined the airline industry and took on British Airlines his main leverage was better customer service. They installed seat-back televisions in their planes and focused on hiring attractive and friendly stewardesses. Their product wasn't all that different from British Airlines, but they packaged it in a better way.

I think it would have been interesting to see if WePay was in the merchant-oriented business and see if they could have beaten paypal at their own game. It might sound crazy, but I think with the right marketing and company mantra it could be done.

I'm incredibly intrigued by the advice from that article, I'd love to read it. Do you remember where it's from?

Sorry... I searched for it, but for the life of me I can't track it down. I think the original article was talking about DuckDuckGo and Google; the "strength" in that case was Google's information-gathering: Google's bottom line is partially defined by using the information it records about its users to drive advertisements and other usability tweaks (such as marking search results with stars, etc). By focusing on privacy, DDG "attacked Google's strength"--Google can't compete with DDG on privacy because it's precluded by what Google does best.

You can obviously frame "lack of privacy" as a weakness of Google, but the important part is that it's a weakness that can't be addressed without huge changes to work around their established strengths.

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