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March 05, 2007
Instant Business Model
Mark Hedlund writes:
One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.
So true, but note that it doesn't really matter if it has already been implemented. AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and Jabber are successfull in the same market as ICQ (and don't forget IRC, still in use by many hackers). Facebook and MySpace are something like wall. The real lesson, I think, is that the basics of human nature are pretty constant. A lot of the examples above are about giving people a way to talk. It's not a novel idea, it's just the manifestation that changes.
Posted by Noel at March 5, 2007 10:48 AM