I have been on both sides of a standard. At Lycos I ran hard inside someone else’s tornado. At Vivox I helped build a layer that game after game was built on. The products we shipped at Lycos have mostly been replaced. Vivox is part of the Unity platform that game designers use to build their worlds today.
That difference is the idea. A product people use can be replaced. A standard people build on outlasts the product, the founder and sometimes the company.
Lycos: fast, and still not the gorilla.
Geoffrey Moore and two co-authors named the pattern in The Gorilla Game. A tornado usually crowns one company whose technology becomes the standard: the gorilla. Others survive around it. The gorilla captures most of the value, because once customers and partners build on its standard, switching becomes expensive.
I lived the portal race at Lycos. We grew the unit’s revenue from $75 million to $135 million. The crown still went to Yahoo for a while, and then to a search company that did not exist when the race began. Running fast inside someone else’s tornado is not the same as setting the standard of your own.
Vivox: the layer nobody chose.
Players never chose Vivox. They chose a game. The voice inside it was a layer they never saw. Many of those games are gone. The voice layer moved from one game to the next. By the time Unity acquired Vivox, it was carrying conversations inside some of the largest online games in the world.
A product people use can be replaced the day something better arrives. A standard people build on is woven into their work.
Increasing returns are the tendency for that which is ahead to get farther ahead, for that which loses advantage to lose further advantage.
I did not see it clearly at the time. Kaneva, where I was COO, was a world people chose to visit. Vivox was a layer they never chose and never saw. If you had asked me then which would endure, I am not sure I would have answered correctly. And even Vivox missed the bigger standard. We built a powerful monolith. You took the whole system or nothing. Twilio broke the same capabilities into small blocks any developer could pick up. The blocks became a standard. The monolith did not.
The economist W. Brian Arthur named the mechanism in 1996: increasing returns. Each builder makes a technology more valuable to the next. The winner is often not the best product. It is the one the most people already build on.
Build blocks, not buildings.
That is why the trust infrastructure I am building now starts as building blocks, not a finished product. If agentic commerce goes through its tornado the way I believe it will, the layer that carries trust between people and their agents will matter for decades. I would rather build a piece of that ground than one more building on top of it.
Legacy is whatever keeps working after you have left the room.
Name the infrastructure.
- Write one sentenceWhat could you build that others would build on? A product, a process, a platform, a community or a standard.
- Break the monolithList what your product does. Mark each piece a partner could pick up and use on its own.
- Count the buildersTrack who builds on you, not only who buys. Builders signal a standard.
- Test the twenty-year lineWhat would keep it running in twenty years without you?
Quick answers.
What is the gorilla in Geoffrey Moore’s Gorilla Game?
In The Gorilla Game, Moore and his co-authors call the gorilla the company whose technology becomes the standard when a market goes through its tornado. Rob Frasca, who ran a Lycos unit in the portal race and was chief product officer at Vivox, uses the idea to argue that what lasts is what other people build on.
Why do standards outlast products?
Rob Frasca’s view: a product people use can be replaced the day something better arrives, while a standard people build on is woven into their work. He points to Vivox, whose voice layer moved from game to game as individual games faded, and to Twilio, whose small building blocks became a standard where a monolithic platform did not.
Sources.
- Rob Frasca, The Creator’s Journey (forthcoming), Chapter XI, Building What Lasts.
- Geoffrey A. Moore, Paul Johnson and Tom Kippola, The Gorilla Game: Picking Winners in High Technology (HarperBusiness, 1998). Book record on Goodreads. Source
- W. Brian Arthur, “Increasing Returns and the New World of Business,” Harvard Business Review, July/August 1996. Source