From the article: "Ask Jack Dorsey,
the co-founder of the social network Twitter and the mobile-payment start-up
Square, what his two companies have in common, and he has a quick answer:
“They’re both utilities.” Mark Zuckerberg might agree: he spent years trying to
convince people that Facebook is not a social network but a “social utility.”
It’s an
intriguing choice of words for such of-the-moment entrepreneurs. Utilities tend
to be boring, slow-growing beasts. They also—and this is the more important
point—tend to be monopolies that are either regulated heavily by governments or
owned outright by them.
Indeed, once
they get beyond a certain size, technology companies do become wary of the
word. Google has been called a utility by lots of people, but you won’t hear
the company’s executives using the term (at least, I couldn’t find any
examples). And Zuckerberg, when asked in 2010 whether, as a utility, Facebook
ought to be regulated, said he hadn’t meant the word that way at all:
“Something that’s cool can fade. But something that’s useful won’t. That’s what
I meant by utility.” Read more
