little bit more

heyitsnoah:

jayparkinsonmd:

How come Posterous is eating dust from a small startup started by a high school dropout?

The answer is as easy as it is counter-intuitive: Tumblr is a New York company and Posterous is a Silicon Valley company.

Or, to put it another way: Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.

While I don’t disagree with any of the stuff they mention in this post, I think there’s also a much simpler explanation: Tumblr (and Posterous) are social sites, which means they’re subject to network effect. In a world like that, the rich get richer and, for the time being, Tumblr seems to be the one on the receiving end of that (though an update to the Insider post points out that Posterous is growing faster). As usual I think this is one of those cases where we are great at post-rationalizing success but reality is something closer to Tumblr is successful because Tumblr is successful.

‘Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. ”People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Newsweek