Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…So again, and here’s another puzzle you have to unlock to win this industry is you need those top 10 publishers to be on your platform because they represent by far or the top 100 publishers, they represent by far the majority of the market. Yeah. My theme is it’s really hard to compete with the platform defaults. Apple ships a podcast app even before they bundled podcast on the phone and, you know, that gets someone 90 percent of the way there, and are they actually going to go the extra mile and go look for a different podcast app, and are they going to look for yours and is yours differentiated enough. I think premium content might be the way to do it, but businesses have won sometimes even illegally over the years because they were able to bundle with the platform. I mean look at how IE achieved dominance on Windows. Yeah, being shipped with the platform is a very clear way to win. Actually, in the mobile world pre-iPhone, it was really difficult to install those Java apps on your flip phone and the way that those companies used to actually get their games and apps distributed was bundling because if it’s on the platform, it’s going to get used. It’s interesting like the… I’m thinking about the blogging space and Google acquired Blogger and you could argue that that’s an example of the platform Google owning Blogger, the distribution channel owning the platform. But Blogger never had the kind of market share that iTunes does, that Apple does with podcasting.…

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