Product, Monopoly and Customer

In the startup world we always hear pitches like "we are the only company to do XXX with no competition" in India or world (depending on the startup's ambition). And yes, I have made similar claims as a startup founder or in my external facing roles with other startups. In most cases, these claims may be true. Say, one needs a road to be constructed where each vendor bidding for the project claims that they are the only player to build road with Asphalt, Gravel, Concrete, Cobble stone, Recycled materials and so on. Of course, each is unique in its own way, but fundamentally each method is a competitor to the rest competing for the same piece of land.

Surprisingly, large (trillion dollar) enterprises who have real monopoly always shy away from using the term. So be it Google for search, Meta for social media, Microsoft for person computing market will consciously avoid using the dreaded word - monopoly. Any hint in that direction will land them into anti-competitive lawsuits among other activist-led media nightmare.

Product and Customer

This post is not about becoming a monopoly (or denouncing one). It is rather to understand how leaders (or monopolies) often forget about what made them that - product and/or service and customer. A case in point is LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has been connecting professionals around the world for nearly 20 years. Everyone with an intent to network in their professional sphere of work will have a presence on LinkedIn. These days undergrads create their LinkedIn profile possibly before their undergrad applications. Such is the impact.

We are now in 2024 with anything possible under the sun using GenAI, CoPilots improving developer productivity, AI helping create beautiful and unique designs, and yet LinkedIn main page looks from pre-2010 era.

The page is functional, yet the look has barely changed since its early days. If we talk about consistency, this is definitely it (pun intended :).

Well, LinkedIn has brought in new features like spelling check/suggestion, post , articles, AI content generator among others. And still the editor for article looks like a college project when there are plethora of editors available that have better UX.

There are only 3 styles available with no choice of font. A spell-fix automatically takes away the cursor of the editor (into not-sure where) which is very irritating when you are in the flow of typing away and suddenly realise that you have ended up with nothing after the spell fix.

There have been instances of app hanging, entire content disappear (there are saved drafts under the Manage option) when my session had timed out, but LI let me continue to write. As a text-heavy platform, one would expect LinkedIn to allow operation in low network bandwidth scenarios (YouTube does), but not LinkedIn.

I am not here to create a defect / wish list of things that LinkedIn could change to match advances in technology. I am just highlighting that this is how monopolies slowly stop being one. The engineering team should / could borrow CoPilot licences from Microsoft to speed up new feature development. Or maybe this is not their priority.

Captive Audience and Captivate

Anyone can create a LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. These are platforms that have had the network effect to enable them to be monopoly. While Twitter, WhatsApp and Facebook have their share of competition, LinkedIn (for any number of reasons) seems to enjoy little or no competition.

And this may be the reason for complacency on the part of product team to improve user experience. Today it behaves like a reluctant engineer who is doing-enough-to-stay-in-the-job.

I am not aware of the internal details that may be preventing LinkedIn from improving the product and experience. I am though sure that it is not due to lack of talent.

Irrespective of the reasons, a captive audience can still be captivated. If Netflix stopped innovating during its hey-day, it would have been long dead. So is true for Google search which while simple & functional continue to stay elegant. So while LinkedIn may not like to claim its monopoly status in professional networking, it has the responsibility to its customers and shareholders to behave like one!