[trekkin]

Honestly, Udacity seems to be losing it. It has only had 14 courses for a while, while Coursera has 200 courses, and counting. And the universities represented at Coursera have better recognition/ranking that at Udacity.

Why would somebody invest in Udacity now?

[robrenaud]

Coursera is awesome, don't get me wrong. I am on my fourth Coursera class (if you count the pre-Coursera ML class, and Quantum Mech that I gave up on a couple weeks in), and I haven't had any real interest in anything Udacity has had to offer. Their offerings seem more basic and less academic; I am happy to get hands on experience at work.

But Coursera fundamentally has the same problem that Hulu has, they are just a platform for distributing content. Hulu is toally at the mercy of the media industry, likewise, Coursera is totally at the mercy of the universities. Now, it is possible that universities will be more giving to Coursera than the big media studios are to Hulu and this won't actually be a problem for Coursera. But it really might actually be a problem if Coursera starts biting into their bottom line.

Thrun, on the other hand, is happy to blow the whole higher ed system up if he can. He is way more outwardly ambitious[1]. This adversarial relationship with the universities might end up killing his strategy, as is consistent with your 200 vs 14 courses number. But it might not, Udacity might just carve up enough of the territory that they really own that they aren't held hostage by the university system they are trying to replace.

[1] When I watch Andrew Ng or Daphne Koller talk about Coursera I notice their unwillingness to say the word "disrupt". I wonder if they are actually equally ambitious as Thurn, just unwilling to admit it, for the sake of not biting the hand that is currently feeding them very well.

[brandnewlow]

Thank you for pinpointing the fundamental difference between these two companies for someone who's not followed the space super carefully.

[paulrademacher]

You could have compared to iTunes instead of Hulu, though. Using that analogy, one company is distributing the vast catalogs of well-established creators, while another is building a studio from the ground up.

[msellout]

It's far too early to call Coursera the incumbent and Udacity the challenger. Plus, challengers sometimes win.