A week ago, John Gruber published a link in Daring Fireball to an article listing out the 16 phones which the press have labelled as "iPhone killers" since the iPhone debuted in 2007.
None of them was.
In recent years, the press has also covered how Facebook has tried to launch a Twitter killer and a Snapchat killer (twice). It should be noted that none of these efforts killed
And don't forget about the time when
What can we learn from this?
First, the press and blogs to love hype up-and-coming tech/gadgets/apps and then identify some possible competitor that they think might "kill" it. We must click on links like that, so I'm not sure if it's the journalists or us to blame for that.
Second, it's almost never the case than an incumbent can successfully launch some new product to "kill" some upstart.
So, when Meerkat "blew up" in March as a livestreaming app built on top of Twitter, its success seemed preordained.
The press gushed. Time called it "the star of South By Southwest." It raised $14 million from several prominent VCs and tech-savvy angels. David Pogue from
Yet, when Twitter did launch its new competitive service called Periscope (on the same day as Meerkat closing its $14 million in funding), Meerkat's usage immediately started to drop as Tero Kuittinen details here.
For some reason, Kuittinen's excellent analysis seemed to get a lot of attention from journalists who didn't like that he criticized their coverage of the Meerkat hype. What I felt was the bigger story here is how Twitter's executive
Think about that.
1. Problem: Meerkat "blowing up"
2. Solution: Take a separate company which Twitter acquired in January but only closed on a month before Meerkat launched, integrate it, launch it at scale... all in 2 weeks.
Twitter did this. And they immediately killed Meerkat. That's remarkable.
I think some execs deserve some credit here. First, Dick Costolo the CEO. They guy was taking hits left and right last year because of the stock drop just because he's the CEO. He had old gray-haired ex-CEOs calling into to CNBC and calling for his head, even though they knew nothing about Twitter or its product. So, Dick deserves the credit when things go well.
Second, Anthony Noto the CFO. Despite some DM fails last year, the Sony leaked emails from the North Korean hackers demonstrated clearly how smart Noto is. The misplaced text DMs from him also showed he had his hands on the M&A strategy at Twitter. That strategy has been small but smart so far.
Third, Rishi Garg, who is head of corporate development at Twitter as of last May, coming over from Square. Cynthia Gaylor and Jessica Verrilli report to Garg.
Finally, new head of product but longtime Twitter employee Kevin Weil. Weil took over the job last October and has seemingly had the Midas touch ever since. Twitter's product has been steadily getting better every month. (And shout-out to Periscope co-founder Kayvon Beykpour for helping create Periscope and correcting me on when Twitter acquired Periscope.)
Of course, it's still early in terms of the life of Periscope. But it appears to be a better product today in Twitter than Meerkat is outside of Twitter. Periscope immediately had synchronous and asynchronous viewing (i.e., both live and recent videos). And the streaming seemed more reliable.
There is a long way to go to see Periscope being a better service and fully monetized, but it seems very difficult to see a reason why people would now use Meerkat. Periscope is "good enough" and will only get better. Betamax, meet VHS.
Congrats to the Twitter team responsible for being so attuned to what was going on in the market and responding so quickly. When so many before you tried to create XYZ killers, you actually did.
[Author was long YHOO at time of writine]
