Why ENS domains will disrupt .com domains and there’s not much that web2 companies and players can do about it.
It’s clear right now that .eth addresses and .com addresses are in similar yet different verticals in the web/internet space. IMO, ENS will emerge as the disruptor.
Web2 proponents believe that they have an insurmountable perch of strength and that ENS domains will never be able to catch up or do not have the same kind of advantages or that the technology is too nascent to be widely adopted. This is not how disruption works.
There’s a biblical saying; “Do not despise the day of small beginnings.” But instead to watch out for them and to understand their implications.
The seminal book by Clayton Christensen “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail”, describes why Large incumbent companies (e.g, .COM and ICANN) actually LOSE market share by listening to their customers and providing what appears to be the highest value products and services to them.
But entrants sthat erve low-value customers with yet fully developed tech can improve fast.
These new entrants scale so quickly and improve so quickly that they are able to take market share from established businesses. (Once again, think ENS versus .COM)
Clayton Christensen writes that these incumbents can actually DO EVERYTHING RIGHT AND STILL FAIL.
What are the aspects of this phenomena and why am I seeing this play out in the .COM vs .ETH battle?
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Technology development takes time with many attempts. The first of these attempts provide little value to the user but in time the value is created increases every quickly.
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Incumbent deal size and volume advantage; .COMs now have the advantage of a huge customers set with high sales every year, they do not need to cater for the marginal user. ENS caters for the individual not commercial entities, yet has a much larger total addressable market.
New entrants like ENS find niches away from the incumbent customer set to build a new product. And as they scale the technology, features ,and use cases, the new entrant creates an indomitable tech advantage.
Witness this in privacy, decentralisation, self sovereignty, property ownership, programmability, money and value transfer, digital sign in and identity solutions, security and authentication of ENS.
Witness this in privacy, decentralisation, self sovereignty, property ownership, programmability, money and value transfer, digital sign in and identity solutions, security and authentication of ENS.
For this very reason; the next generation product is not being built by the incumbent, which in our case is .COM.
This is clearly happening now.
The .COM customer base is not interested in these features and thus no incentive for .COM to build for them these features.
When the new tech becomes interesting to the incumbent’s customers it is already too late for the incumbent to react. It is now too late to keep up with the new entrant’s growth and disruption occurs. This occurs slowly at first and then all of a sudden.
I would like to think that this phenomenon is more aptly called THE INCUMBENT’S CURSE.
It is precisely because of their strengths and because they have ignored customers or users which can provide the next S curve in growth, why this happens.
There has been no development of .COM for web3, and web2 users and companies point to strength instead of rising opportunity because it is too small. Once they have woken up, it is always too late. It is already probably too late.