Yea and few of those services that "disrupted" Craigslist are well known. The population at large knows maybe 3 of them.
Because if you have to market and brand each comprehensible English description such as recipes, dating, selling used junk with some weird brand name like Cucumbertron, NotOkCupid or whatever, it's an uphill battle. The market can only accept a few new big brands a year.
When a normal person (as a opposed to a computer obsessed geek) wants to do stuff on a computer, they want to do it without learning a million little brands that do narrow little tasks, take time to find, learn a UI, figure out if they work right.
They want to type in "dating", click on some profiles and schedule dates.
Whatever companies compete to handle this service are under the hood. To the user "it just works." Without that niche services face a lottery in an over-saturated market of niche services. That's really why big brands exist in the digital realm and take massive effort or long periods of time to dethrone.
Craigslist and YouTube work because they provide a consistent, predictable way to access a multitude of services and video topics. That's something the "web" or computers in general should handle instead of companies. That's what really needs to be disrupted.
While I understand and agree with most of this post, I prefer the all-in-one aspect of YouTube. Having six different apps for different categories of video is not ideal to me.
Because if you have to market and brand each comprehensible English description such as recipes, dating, selling used junk with some weird brand name like Cucumbertron, NotOkCupid or whatever, it's an uphill battle. The market can only accept a few new big brands a year.
When a normal person (as a opposed to a computer obsessed geek) wants to do stuff on a computer, they want to do it without learning a million little brands that do narrow little tasks, take time to find, learn a UI, figure out if they work right.
They want to type in "dating", click on some profiles and schedule dates.
Whatever companies compete to handle this service are under the hood. To the user "it just works." Without that niche services face a lottery in an over-saturated market of niche services. That's really why big brands exist in the digital realm and take massive effort or long periods of time to dethrone.
Craigslist and YouTube work because they provide a consistent, predictable way to access a multitude of services and video topics. That's something the "web" or computers in general should handle instead of companies. That's what really needs to be disrupted.