[pjio]

I sometimes wonder if the best way to dominate a market would be to grow sustainable and wait out the competition until they crash themself with their self sabotaging strategy of unhealthy, exploitive behavior. This article was just, what I needed to read today.

[n4r9]

That would be sweet. The sad truth is that a big company can coast on unhealthy exploitative behaviours for many years; perhaps decades.

[ozgrakkurt]

This doesn’t apply to vc funded startups

[n4r9]

Not sure what you mean. Uber scaled from VC funded startup to megacorp despite a raft of exploitative practices.

[ozgrakkurt]

Longevity can be achieved for a company with two devs and no outside investment with 15k/month income so they can live ok.

But for a vc funded startup you need way more revenue to keep raising money. This is from what I learned in the startups I worked at.

I guess uber is a huge success compared to your median startup right?

[GoatOfAplomb]

I think Fogbugz sort of tried this? I guess it still exists. But it certainly hasn't "won".

[lmm]

Yep. If anything VC-funded sales-heavy Atlassian ate their lunch.

[FreakLegion]

Atlassian was bootstrapped to high eight-figure revenue and profitability before they took investor money, much like GitHub. They very much won on their own.

[mamcx]

Others said don't work, but mainly if you aim too high.

THIS is exactly how you survive as small/solo company/consultant.

In fact, all my customers wish I have more time to redo most of the tools that they use. (Tipical scenario: "Hey your app that make invoices is neat, why you don't just add a module for our industrial process and because we want to integrate all and you need to add email capabilities then just add a word processor that is like excel, but good")

The "just add" is not only being naive or greedy, sometimes people dream that the few ones they can actually rely could do all already...

[klabb3]

This is pretty much Valve, no?

[Yizahi]

More like GOG. Valve was an outlier due to first mover advantage. GOG is what people are describing here - company tries to compete in the already established market by providing a "fair" service. If I remember correctly GOG is struggling to survive at all.

[klabb3]

TIL. But what’s unfair with Valve or Steam?

[Yizahi]

I didn't mean it like that, certainly nothing unfair about Valve. It's just that GOG tries to differentiate by being slightly more consumer oriented than all other competitors - no DRM as a principle, much longer refund window, ability to legally download a complete installers for games, interop (basic) with competitors, programs to update abandonware for modern systems etc. But it seems that it's not enough to become successful even after years of hard work and becoming a stable recognized brand.

[klabb3]

Ah yeah, that makes sense. If Valve didn’t exist I imagine that they would have been more successful. Because the same is true in the other direction - enshittified launchers from EA, Ubisoft etc are avoided by a lot of gamers and are not successful on their own merits.

What makes it challenging is that there is no standard format for game libraries. If instead you had a game library software that was interoperable with different vendors (like an email client or web browser) it would have been possible to buy and collect games from different vendors or publishers without having to manage multiple accounts and libraries.

I guess the lesson is that systems of middlemen are fragile and problematic even when the middleman are acting in good faith. Getting rid of middlemen gate keepers is both a technical and social challenge, and not easy.

[adastra22]

Unfortunately the wait-it-out strategy typically works the other direction.

[mananaysiempre]

Feels like this is a finance-fueled version of the age-old stratagem of dumping, but existing laws against that were not written with it in mind, and in any case would not work fast enough for the good-faith competitors to remain afloat.