2nd
Crossing the Line
Successful startups and markets usually draw competitors. Competitors in turn fight it out for market share. This is both normal and OK.
However not everyone knows how to fight. A good metaphor for this would be rattlesnakes. The only rattlesnake that will kill you on the spot is a baby. The younger the snake the less control it has in regulating its venom so it basically shoots too much poison.
A start up in the blog space named Posterous decided to go after all of their competitors with a super simple import tool. So far so good. But then, like the baby rattler, they did not know how to control their message and went too far. For me the line was crossed when they showed this chart to the right comparing the services, which is just not true. Tumblr, since I started using it in 2007 has had native support for email posting that does work for anyone. In terms of the other 2 things, comments and emailing posts you can do both with Tumblr using 3rd party software, so I would say that Posterous showing the X on those is at best misleading.
In addition to their false charts Posterous went on to call all of their competitors “Dying Platforms”. Stupid for 2 reasons, the first is that the only blog platform that seems to be dying is theirs (see traffic chart) and second and most importantly you do not want to have dying competitors as that typically points to a dying market.
Again back to the rattlesnake, I just have to figure that the guys at Posterous do not have the experience to know how to properly fight. Their import tool approach was genius, the way they rolled it out will overall hurt them IMHO.
I have seen a number of companies take this hyper-aggressive approach to competition along my 10 years in startups. Thankfully Karma seems to always have the last laugh because most of those companies are now dead.
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Also read Andrew Hyde’s post on this
via David Noel
