Vox Now Open To All
Today, Vox the blogging service whose secret sauce seems to be integrated social networking, announced that its invite-only beta has now ended, and it is open for all. For an in depth review of Vox, please see our own Darnell’s review over here.
Although it is different than WordPress.com and Blogger in a few ways, it’ll be interesting to see how it does in the long run. It is so far behind in subscribership (granted, it just started) one wonders what kind of marketing hi-jinks it’ll do to steal away ‘blogshare’ away from the larger kids.
Who says Vox has to steal anything? It’s actually different from WordPress.com and Blogger in a lot of ways(which Darnell’s “in-depth” review does almost nothing to reveal), and if people want those features, they’ll go and use it. The controlled increase of subscribership has been intentional.
I guess your opinion is that Vox has gone “Blue Ocean Strategy” with its automagical blogging service. But I agree — the market will see how far the Vox story will go.
If you tell me what “Blue Ocean Strategy” is supposed to mean, I’ll let you know. Otherwise, go no further than my actual words.
My point is that to me, WordPress.com, Blogger, and Vox having a single overlap in their potential userbase(people looking for hosted blogging) isn’t quite enough to make the stealing of users much of a question. It’s a hassle to move from one to another, links are lost, etc.
But, Vox has a bunch of features the other two don’t, which I don’t expect WP has any plans to offer, and considering Blogger’s history of feature addition, well…
So, if someone is looking for those additional features, the issue is moot again, because Vox is the only option.
What’s much more interesting than this manufactured rivalry is the partial internal overlaps with LiveJournal and TypePad. I’m curious to see what sort of shift in users occurs there, though the target audiences are different enough that I don’t actually expect all that much. It’s easy to claim they’re very similar, but if someone were to spend a little time properly comparing the services, they’d find it very simple to predict what sort of user would end up where. Yes, there’s feature overlap, but the differences between the services are quite significant.
“Blue Ocean Strategy” is exactly what you’re talking about.
Rather than competing for smaller and smaller pools of customers, some companies have decided to either reposition themselves, or reorganize their offerings to create something entirely new — thereby creating an entirely “uncontested market space”.
http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-Uncontested-Competition/dp/1591396190/ref=pd_sxp_f_pt/104-8882542-6525540
No need to pull out the daggers here, Su — we’re all friends. ;)