HACKER Q&A
📣 telotortium

Timing product release for when competitor's product is stale?


On https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32247652 I saw the following interesting quote:

> Ironic how Google tried Google+ and failed because Facebook had all the users and content. If Google had just shelved theirs as-is for 10 years and pulled it back out now, people would flock to it because it would actually be a feed of your friends/family posts in chronological order, with user-customized filtering, again.

While I'm not sure I agree in the case of Google+, the idea of waiting to release a product until your competitor's product is long in the tooth and really disappointing users is intriguing. Have any companies intentionally released a product to steal users away from a stale product?


  👤 celticninja Accepted Answer ✓
I think that's the time to market it not the time to release it. You want a stable service for people to switch to.

As an example, counter.social used the musk/Twitter debacle to drive users to their site