Wanderings,Musings and Happenings from Ian on Singapore
Trying to build a craigslist killer:
But practical people will find his (the consultant to the newspapers) excuse almost as damning as the evidence that provokes it, for a truly excellent strategy will tolerate myriad failures in execution, while a weak strategy reveals its weakness in the very fact that it is impossible to execute correctly.
Unbrand, Uncompete, Demonetize:
As long as craigslist can support its 30 employees on “merely” an estimated $100 million in revenue, there simply isn’t enough cash in this space to keep a giant-sized competitor interested over the long term. When I first saw Jim Buckmaster talk, in 2004, he described his strategy in three words: unbrand, uncompete and demonetize. His victory over eBay illustrates the paradoxical power of demonetization.
By eliminating marketing, sales, and business development, craigslist’s programmers have cut out all the cushioning layers that separate them from the users they serve, and any right they have to teach lessons in public service comes from the odd situation of running a company that is directly subservient only to the public. Here’s the lesson: The public is a motherfucker.
Craig Newmark says that craigslist works because people are good, and he has stuck to this point of view without wavering. Whether you accept it as true will depend on your standard of goodness.
Yet it seems,
And just as people who run technical companies are reaching an apex of confidence in their ability to invent new forms of community based on sharing everything, craigslist still treats social life as dangerously complex, deserving the most jaded caution. Corporate isolation, user anonymity, refusal of excessive profit, glacial adoption of new features: These all signal Newmark and Buckmaster’s wariness about what humans, including themselves, might do if given the chance. There may be a peace sign on every page, but the implicit political philosophy of craigslist has a deeply conservative, even a tragic cast. Every day the choristers of the social web chirp their advice about openness and trust; craigslist follows none of it, and every day it grows.
