Comment by linkregister
10 days ago
Reminds me of Facebook, there was nothing particularly interesting about a PHP app that stored photos and text in a flat user environment.
Yet somehow the network effects worked out well and the website was the preeminent social network for almost a decade.
Social media is the king of network effects. Almost nothing else compares. See how quickly people drop AI products for the next one that does the same thing but slightly better. To switch from ChatGPT to Gemini I don't have to convince all of my friends and family to do the same.
> See how quickly people drop AI products for the next one that does the same thing but slightly better.
> To switch from ChatGPT to Gemini I don't have to convince all of my friends and family to do the same.
Except Gemini is a complete joke that can’t even complete request on iOS unless you keep scree unlocked or keep the app in the foreground. So I’m not sure how it proves your point.
Even if this was true, it would simply be a software bug that could be resolved. Not an example of network effects. My use of an AI product is not impacted by what my friends and family use.
> Social media is the king of network effects. Almost nothing else compares.
Ecommerce is close second
Technology does not determine the success of a company. I’ve seen amazing tech fail, and things strapped together with ducktape and bubblegum be a wild success.
The instant someone makes a better version of openclaw -literally- everyone is going to jump ship.
There is no lock in at all.
Except in this case there's no network effect for autonomous agents. In fact, Peter is going to be working mostly on an OpenAI locked down, ecosystem tied agent, which means it's going to be worse than OpenClaw, but with a nicer out of the box experience.
If you're on OpenAI, and I'm on Anthropic, can we interoperate? What level are we even trying to interoperate on? The network effect is that, hey, my stuff is working here, your stuff is working over there. So do we move to your set of tools, or my set of tools, or do we mismash between them, as our relationship and power dynamics choose for us.
I'd describe that as platform lock-in rather than the network effect.
facebook is still preeminent social network today