While the product might not even be that good, it has clear dominance of the mobile smartphone market in every country other than the US. In the US it's 43.1% market share (which is very strong).
There's no doubt that Google has managed to win this very important market.
I'll add the point that if all you've ever eaten is the best of the best, you don't really appreciate something as much as if you've experienced the middle or lower ends.
Anecdote: I dry age my own steaks, and I've realized that people don't really appreciate them as much as if they're eaten side by side with a "control" steak that's unaged.
I remember the first time I wrote an entire controller and everything worked exactly like it did in my head. There was a lot of whooping and dancing to be had.
My diabetic fiance has a similar experience. If she speaks gibberish in the middle of the night, I use it as a good indicator that she has low blood sugar.
I ran into a similar issue with my app Storyweave (www.getstoryweave.com). There seems to be a wall after your friends and family get tapped out.
The advice I've received is that at this point, you need to build some social features into your app that allow users to share the app with other people automatically. This involves:
- Sharing content to other social media platforms (e.g. post this photo on FB or Twitter)
- Inviting friends in the app (e.g. find friends from your Facebook or Twitter followers list, and/or invite your friends using your contacts
- Etc. Etc.
The former. The article indicates that while costs of office space have increased (doubled in rate really), when compared to the increase in costs from employee salaries, it's minuscule in comparison.
Thus, the vast majority of the increase in costs that it takes to run a startup is in employee salaries, rather than office space.
Key point to take away from this is: Wages constitute the majority of the increase in startup expenses. Real estate costs add only 5% of per employee costs.
The market has driven up salaries ridiculously high.