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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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They may be failing but they have replaced the industry so it's irrelevant.
Do you use Yahoo or AltaVista to search?
Do you still use taxis?
Do you use Blockbuster or subscribe to a standard cable package?
I'd wager you say no to all of them. So while the old may be right, it's irrelevant because they were still outperformed and no longer exist or are just not as competitive.
Again, people get hung up on the best or right way to do things when the reality is that's not how business works.
You'd lose that wager, actually—this area has at least two taxi companies but no ride shares (Uber and Lyft have very little penetration in Canada outside a few specific cities), and our household does subscribe to a standard cable TV package, although it's mostly for the benefit of my elderly mother. Those companies have not been nearly as disruptive as some people think they have.
(As for Google's search engine, I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole these days. And Yahoo and AltaVista both sucked even when they were popular—I preferred InfoSeek, back in the day.)
Anecdotally sure, but for the majority of people I'd be right. And that's what matters - at a small level you'll have outliers but if you're winning the majority of the market then you will crush your competitors. Again it's irrelevant whether your code is good or efficient or replaced by llms so long as you are winning long enough to kill your competition.
Actually, what really matters is not the quality of your code or the disruptiveness of your paradigm, or whether you can outlive the competitors that existed when you started up, but whether you can keep the money coming. The rideshares in particular will fail over time in any country with labour laws that allow drivers to unionize—if the drivers make a sane amount of money, the company's profits plummet, and investors and shareholders head for the hills. Netflix is falling apart already because the corporations with large libraries of content aren't so happy to license them anymore, and they're scrambling to make up the revenue they've lost. Google will probably survive only because its real product is the scourge of humanity known as advertising.
Again, it's all business considerations, not technical ones. Remember the dot-com boom of the 1990s, or are you not old enough? A lot of what's going on right now looks like the 2.0 (3.0? 4.0?) release of the same thing. A few of these companies will survive, but more of them will fold, and in some cases their business models will go with them.
I actually don't disagree with you and think we're on the same page. Basically, you can summarise our whole discussion as all companies are doomed to fail at end of day.
If you don't change and innovate you will fail.
If you change and innovate too much you will fail.
Finding the middle ground is rough and most companies will fail.