Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Facebook case: Winner-Take-All or place for a new player?

Working today on an interesting Harvard case about Facebook for our class on Business Strategy in the Networked Economy by Prof Planbeck.

It is interesting to see how the network externalities (same-side and cross-side) and their bundling strategy (to increase the switching costs to another Social Network) advocate for a Winner-Take-All path but we could have thought the same of MySpace and that did not happen. For a new player to disloge Facebook, it would need to make a major technological/service breakthrough.

What do you think it could be?