Spotify has one mission: music. They do it really well. Google has a hundred hands in a hundred industries and only do a few of them very well. Google could shut their music service down for no reason at all. Spotify on the other hand has just gone all-in on ensuring they are a lasting institution.
In the same light, Spotify is incentivized to crush the music app space. They need the best UI, the best discovery experiences, etc... whereas Google’s product is like the rich family that funds their son’s strange lifestyle business: It can live or die and the world keeps spinning. They do not need to innovate or be better... and they really aren’t.
My wife used Spotify before we met. My sister uses it. My step mom uses it. All my buddies use it. I can count dozens of people around me that use it. It’s almost becoming a verb now: “Spotify it”. On the contrary, I only know one or two diehard google fanboys who use their music product.
So I guess at the end of the day.. to answer your question, yes you’re missing something!
That’s true for most things. While everyone thought Google Drive or One Drive or Some other drive company will kill Dropbox because making syncing storage isn’t rocket science, they were wrong.
A nimble team of people focused on solving one core problem, whose entire livelihood depends on it working well, triumphs the giants.
We can assume Microsoft and Google has enough middle management that they’ll fk it up along the way for sure. Too many agendas and failure doesn’t mean much.
Therefore it’s in the best interest of giants to acquire companies that fit their mission and scale them with their marketing power. YouTube, Android, docs, are all good plays by google.
In the same light, Spotify is incentivized to crush the music app space. They need the best UI, the best discovery experiences, etc... whereas Google’s product is like the rich family that funds their son’s strange lifestyle business: It can live or die and the world keeps spinning. They do not need to innovate or be better... and they really aren’t.
My wife used Spotify before we met. My sister uses it. My step mom uses it. All my buddies use it. I can count dozens of people around me that use it. It’s almost becoming a verb now: “Spotify it”. On the contrary, I only know one or two diehard google fanboys who use their music product.
So I guess at the end of the day.. to answer your question, yes you’re missing something!