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by alexhu11 3806 days ago
The barriers to entry for any competitors are highly behavioral. Consumers are used to using (and implicitly trusting) AirBnB and Uber. Any new entrants would have to replicate that. This is part of the reason why Jet.com will never beat Amazon.
2 comments
tracker1 3806 days ago
I remember when Yahoo was a manual index, AltaVista was the best internet search, and Hotmail wasn't a MicroSoft owned company... when most email addresses were truly painful (anyone remember doing internet email via fidonet? compuserve?).

Google has now been king for a while, but if someone came out that did things clearly better, people aren't tethered.. even Facebook has its' upstart competition (that they keep buying off).

People are less tied to their services than you think.. yeah, plenty of people are still using yahoo mail, and others aol for email even... but few are dialing in and fewer still could remember their icq login if they tried.

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alexhu11 3806 days ago
Do users pay for any of those services you mentioned? This changes the dynamic completely by forcing the user to become engaged.

At the core AirBnB and Uber are selling commodities. They appear to be the lowest-cost producer because of their cost structure and scale. The price advantage alone is a high wall to scale.

Could another entrant come and improve the AirBnB or Uber experience 10x? Maybe. I wouldn't bet money on it though.

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jsprogrammer 3806 days ago
Jet.com won't beat Amazon because they are selling a subset of Amazon's products for higher prices with a worse interface.
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alexhu11 3806 days ago
You just pointed out another barrier to entry for Uber and AirBnB. New entrants will probably have less selection and higher cost. This is fatal in a fundamentally commodity business. There will be no competitor to AirBnB or Uber for the foreseeable future.
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tracker1 3806 days ago
Lyft seems to be doing okay, and don't underestimate targeted markets for upstart competition... If you can get most of the BnBs in say Sedona, Prescott and Payson Arizona to use your upstart service, you can grow from there, one targeted market at a time... local presence can be a significant advantage.
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alexhu11 3806 days ago
The textbook response would be a price war. Raise prices in uncompetitive cities and lower prices in at risk cities. This is one of the tools Standard Oil used to create its monopoly.
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