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Mark Hendrickson
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8 months ago
in Nick Carr: Still wrong on Google, Part 2 on Mathew's comments
You're confusing the idea that Google has benefited tremendously from the Web's network of pages with the altogether different idea that it has achieved its success through the establishment of a network effect.
A service that enjoys a network effect gains value simply by having more people participate in it directly. Often, this value gets so large that users are reluctant to use competing services that don't have as many users (bars and parties, by the way, experience this exact phenomenon all the time -- who wants to hang out at an empty drinking hole when there's a rager next door?).
Ebay and Facebook both owe their successes (in large part) to the network effect because they managed to establish attractive user bases early on that then enticed many others to jump aboard instead of going elsewhere.
Google, on the other hand, doesn't get much more fun or useful if ten of my friends start using it. Sure, it does get more useful if ten of my friends start to blog or create websites (as do Yahoo and Live Search). But it's a contortion of the term "network effect" to suggest that this is the same type of scenario as the one above simply because it involves a "network" of people or things in a general sense.
A service that enjoys a network effect gains value simply by having more people participate in it directly. Often, this value gets so large that users are reluctant to use competing services that don't have as many users (bars and parties, by the way, experience this exact phenomenon all the time -- who wants to hang out at an empty drinking hole when there's a rager next door?).
Ebay and Facebook both owe their successes (in large part) to the network effect because they managed to establish attractive user bases early on that then enticed many others to jump aboard instead of going elsewhere.
Google, on the other hand, doesn't get much more fun or useful if ten of my friends start using it. Sure, it does get more useful if ten of my friends start to blog or create websites (as do Yahoo and Live Search). But it's a contortion of the term "network effect" to suggest that this is the same type of scenario as the one above simply because it involves a "network" of people or things in a general sense.
1 reply
mathewi
Thanks for the comment, Mark -- as I said in my reply to Brad above, I know that Google didn't invent the network effect that it benefits from. But at the same time, I don't see how Nick can make the statement that Google's success has "nothing to do with the network effect." That's just not true.
