Thread by @corry_wang

A contrarian sentiment I've heard a lot recently is that "small and focused always wins" in tech. Now, this certainly *felt* right the first time I heard it - off the top of my head, I couldn't actually think of that many counterexamples

But on the other hand, this could just be the availability heuristic at work... so in the interest of intellectual honesty, I sat down for 20 minutes and compiled a list of every small and focused tech company I could think of that ultimately got stomped. Here's what I got:

1) Netscape -> Microsoft
2) Fitbit / Jawbone -> the Apple Watch
3) Lotus Notes -> Microsoft Word
4) Blackberry and Palm -> the iPhone (in the eternal words of Palm CEO Ed Colligan, circa 2006: “PC guys are not going to just figure this out")

5) Rackspace -> Amazon Web Services
6) Rhapsody -> iTunes Store
6) Mapquest -> Google Maps (ok fine Mapquest was owned by AOL already at that point)
7) Literally any adtech company in the late 2000s -> Google (though yes, I suppose they did acquire Doubleclick)

To be honest, this list was harder to put together than I expected (so maybe there's some truth to "small and focused" after all? either that or I just don't know enough failed mid-2000s consumer startups) - I'll probably update this list periodically, always open to suggestions

Two more enterprise names I just thought of:
8) Fusion-io -> Netapp + all the other legacy guys
9) Extreme Networks -> Cisco

Does "small and focused" matter less in enterprise? CIOs don't care about UX, they want one throat to choke, etc... but maybe the cloud changes that?

This tweet from @stevesi reminded me of a good one to add to this list:



10) QuarkXPress -> Adobe Creative Suite (and Adobe probably killed a bunch of other smid-cap companies making "creative" software in the 90s / early 2000s that I've never heard of)

@stevesi 11) Diapers.com / Quidsi

For all of the talk today that Amazon has no focus vs nimbler vertical e-commerce companies, I think it’s pretty tough to argue that Marc Lore was ultimately the victor in the original Amazon-Diapers.com price war