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I can take that side:
The early days of the internet was a sparse set of pocket communities, loosely connected under rapidly evolving standards, different cross-cutting concerns becoming mini fiefdoms (browsers: Netscape, IE; access: compuserve, prodigy, AOL; communication protocols: email, gopher, ftp, http, usenet), some with strong cultural norms and self-enforced behaviors. As standards emerged and blood was shed on the battlefield, many victors of their fiefdoms tried to extend their grasp to adjacent territories (Microsoft -> MSN, AOL -> Usenet). By a decade's time, all of these things died by their own mistakes: Microsoft lost the browser and access wars, AOL lost everything.
Why? Because they weren't approaching it holistically as a new system to collaborate within and create new things, but rather, to try to extend their control on more things that people were wanting to do on the web.
Who won? The web natives: Google became the sprawling indexer, connecting people to more things, rather than locking people's interaction surface of the world. Amazon became the physical and digital logistics giant, plumbing the majority of the web's services.
The way I personally view the base strategy, is that they hitched their wagon to a set of nascent technologies โ ethereum scales poorly, so they made a centralized sequencer to handle more throughput, only to get bottlenecked on other limitations. They condensed their entire strategy around making everything a token, missing the entirely new emergent properties of crypto: trustlessness, privacy, and self sovereignty.
Their strategy is the same playbook AOL played. And it worked for AOL for a few years. Where are they now?
Crypto is more than digital land grabs for AOL Keywords. 4 replies
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