Duncan Riley: scale and adoption beat functionality any day

New 2Web member Duncan Riley makes a great point about Web 2.0-onomics: massive scale and widespread adoption are probably the most important drivers of success so far, and they are much more important than actual functionality. Hype beats feature.

But this isn't new to Web 2.0 - it also happened in some areas in Web 1.0. The most obvious example is eBay, which was uglier, buggier and harder to use than many of its competitors, but it "achieved scale" (got big) and "widespread adoption" (everybody started using it) first, by a wide margin. In any naturally monopolistic segment (like classifieds, auctions, and online community [flickr, myspace, etc] it's clear that scale and adoption rule - don't spend too many cycles tweaking your features.