It's commonplace to mock Big Tech for being slow-moving and lacking an innovation ability with several examples of startups that competed with, and defeated products from Big Tech. There are tons of examples of this (YouTube Vs Google Video as one). What are examples of the reverse? Like Pebble (smartwatches) losing to Apple Watch, Clubhouse (Kindda pending) losing to Twitter Spaces, Slack (??? had to sell to Big Tech) losing to bundled Big Tech 'Work'.<p>Sure, there are also examples where the startups did not exactly die Dropbox/Box Vs Big Tech storage.
Your examples are all tech vs. tech. Tech vs. brick-and-mortar has been an absolute bloodbath. Most local bookstores are gone. Sears, and many smaller retailers. Malls are dead. You kids probably don't remember cool independent computer shops (though there are a few hangers-on). Payless shoes comes to mind, apparently they're trying to bounce back. Local newspapers died at the hands of craigslist, which isn't even "big" tech.
“Large” companies like Lotus, WordPerfect and Ashton-Tate were founded years after Microsoft, came to dominate their niches, and were thoroughly crushed when Microsoft expanded into those niches.<p>This is a great read about the rise and fall of WordPerfect. <a href="http://www.wordplace.com/ap/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wordplace.com/ap/</a>
There’s one of these stories every year at WWDC when Apple PMs take top apps and turn them into OS features. “Sherlocked” is a phrase for a reason.<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/4/18651190/apple-ios-13-mac-os-catalina-third-party-apps-products-copy-wwdc-2019" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/4/18651190/apple-ios-13-mac-...</a>
Strange to me that you put Dropbox on here since they've really struggled to succeed on their own. I think Steve Jobs was right when he said it was a "feature, not a product." Selling to Google or Apple I think would've been the better move in hindsight.<p>Snapchat is probably a good example of a company that made the right move by <i>not</i> being acquired.
A recurring theme in this thread is that big tech often gives away free products as loss leaders and this kills any business that relied on selling a comparable product. I can't really think of many instances where big tech out-innovated a smaller competitor into obscurity using the same business model.<p>I think a lot of times they would rather just buy the company than hope that they can somehow be more innovative.<p>Maybe Facebook/Instagram vs Snapchat?
I need to mention TikTok, it's evident that TikTok is the game-changer, but the most important is that TikTok got so many users from Meta(Facebook & Instagram) and YouTube. TikTok is the unique reason why Facebook has lost users for the first time in its history. Here you can find more info(<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/02/facebook-earnings-meta/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/02/faceboo...</a>). Maybe in a couple of years, TikTok (ByteDance) will be the next big tech out there.
While it's true Google Video was not able to get traction vs. YouTube, I've also read some good accounts of the merger that YouTube would have crumbled had they not had the resources from Google (both machine and people) needed to scale.
Google Cloud/kubernetes vs Docker Inc.<p>Docker had a lot of problems, but it didn't help that they had made bets in orchestration and then the industry largely converged on kubernetes instead of their products.
Delicious, or del.icio.us, the bookmarking site [1], which popularized tagging as an information management technique. Very popular in the decade of the 2000s. Founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003, acquired by Yahoo in 2005. A leaked memo from Yahoo in 2010 said they were "sunsetting" the site, leading to an exodus of users. Sold by Yahoo in 2011 to another company that ruined it. Acquired by Pinboard in 2017, but not revived.<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)</a>
Just FYI, roughly half of the US includes startups in "Big Tech". Anything in Silicon Valley is considered Big Tech. A local shop that has programmers wouldn't be, though.
Classifies, now on Craigslist. There were many pulp magazines (like Want-Ads) that are gone, never mind the newspaper industry which is dying a very slow death.