Everybody wants to rule the world
Online businesses can grow very large very fast—it is what makes them exciting. Does it also make them unusual threats to competition?
“WE ARE taking over the world of yoga.” At the graduation day for 500 Startups, a school for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, such statements of focused megalomania are the norm. “We will own this space,” predicts the founder of a company that helps shops send digital offers to nearby phones. A company which rates people’s online behaviour says it is planning “world domination”.
It is a joke that sounds like hubris, and there is indeed plenty of that to be seen. But in this context global ambitions on the part of the only-just-begun are oddly reasonable. If your idea for a service or product can be scaled up to cover the world, why would you not plan to do just that? And if your idea cannot be scaled up that way, should you not find one that can? After all, capturing a significant, even dominant share of the world market more or less straight out of the box is clearly possible. It has been crucial for the internet’s biggest successes: Amazon (About half of America’s book market, more than that in e-books); Alibaba (about 80% of e-commerce in China); Facebook (which claims 1.3 billion active members); and Google (68% of online searches in America, more than 90% in Europe).
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "Everybody wants to rule the world"
From the November 29th 2014 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionMore from Briefing
America’s $61bn aid package buys Ukraine time
It must use it wisely
America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population
Which is a worry, because much of it is already shrinking
Homeowners face a $25trn bill from climate change
Property, the world’s biggest asset class, is also its most vulnerable