“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).
via Internet monopolies: Everybody wants to rule the world | The Economist.
