[copsarebastards]

The main arguments against there being a bubble seem to be that things aren't as obviously a bubble as they were before the previous tech bubble. This is all a businessperson's approach to analyzing this situation.

Looking at it from a technical perspective: there are two kinds of companies out there. There are companies that do something people care about and ones that don't.

Think about Twitter for a second. If Twitter dropped off the face of the earth, would you really care? I wouldn't. Even if I used Twitter, it wouldn't be hard to just go find all the same people on Facebook or whatever and follow them there. People and companies use Twitter for self-promotion, but that puts Twitter into the same business demographic as a TV channel that runs infomercials. Some people watch infomercials, but if the entire infomercial market disappeared, nobody would really care. The problem with Twitter isn't that they can't monetize their product, it's that they don't have a product.

Then there are companies that actually have a product. They may not charge for their product, but if they did, people would pay for it. Uber and AirBNB charge for their products.

Duolingo doesn't charge language learners, but they probably could: my experience is that they are more effective for language learning than Pimsleur, which a lot of people pay for. It's an artifact of the Google age that companies don't actually charge for their product, but charge for ancilliary services around it. Google doesn't charge for search: they charge for ads. But if Google decided to start charging $10/mo for search? A lot of people would pay it.

[mbrubeck]

> Even if I used Twitter, it wouldn't be hard to just go find all the same people on Facebook or whatever and follow them there.

The fact that Twitter overlaps with other services like Facebook doesn't mean it's not valuable. For example, to take one of your own examples:

> If Google decided to start charging $10/mo for search? A lot of people would pay it.

"Even if I used Google, it wouldn't be hard to just go enter the same searches on Bing or DuckDuckGo and find web sites there instead."

[copsarebastards]

> "Even if I used Google, it wouldn't be hard to just go enter the same searches on Bing or DuckDuckGo and find web sites there instead."

Okay, go try that and compare the results.

It's not about overlapping, it's about it being equivalent. Bing and DuckDuckGo are not equivalent to Google. They are inferior products. That may change (I hope it does) but for now that is how it is.

[mbrubeck]

You could make the same counter-argument about Facebook and Twitter. If you really think they're interchangeable, that just tells me that you don't value the things that many of their users do.

Edit: Downvoted your original comment by accident, and there's no undo button. Sorry. :( Maybe someone else reading this can fix that?

[copsarebastards]

> You could make the same counter-argument about Facebook and Twitter. If you really think they're interchangeable, that just tells me that you don't value the things that many of their users do.

I don't think you could. Facebook doesn't offer an inferior product to Twitter, it offers products that are effectively the same, and come packaged with other products.

I really don't think many people value the 140-character limit, which is the only core difference between Twitter and Facebook feeds.

I can totally identify with the criticism that I don't value the same things as Twitter/Facebook users (I don't have accounts on either service). But I think I'm capable of empathizing with them and extrapolating what they value from each product.

[army]

Even if Toyota went away, it wouldn't be so hard to just go and buy a Mazda or whatever and drive that around.