zlacker

> That's why "technical novelty" ranks ridiculously low on scale of things that make most successful software businesses these days: if anything technical novelty is more of an albatross on most software businesses than a saving grace.

Not convinced. Why did Google beat Yahoo? Why is Facebook huge while Friendster and Myspace are jokes? At some point - perhaps further down the line than most of us are used to thinking of - technical ability matters.

>>lmm+(OP)
If you think that the landscape you build a company in hasn't changed in the 2 decades since the founding of Facebook, there's not much to tell you.

And even Facebook definitely didn't win because if some technical choice... no one cared what tech stack powered a social media site, and if anything Facebook was less advanced than MySpace as far as users were concerned.

—

If you're talking about how it matters further down the line, then you're walking away from the wrapper thesis too: the whole line being parroted is that it's just an API wrapper ripe for the copying. Good luck getting to the "further down the line" reliably as a company, let alone down the line and then killing your competitor with a game plan that mostly consists of copying them.