I really like the idea of businesses focused on their core value proposition. However, in tech, these businesses get crushed by larger platform plays see for e

I really like the idea of businesses focused on their core value proposition. However, in tech, these businesses get crushed by larger platform plays see for example Firefox vs. chrome, slack vs teams, Aws vs digital ocean. There are a few factors at play here, but I’ll call out a few I’ve observed. 1) If you hire good engineers and give them autonomy, branching into new markets is cheaper than you think. “Focusing” engineers tends to just cut back on autonomy, both lowering productivity as well as limiting the quality of engineering talent one can attract. 2) Unified, integrated solutions, with great default options are preferred by nearly everyone on the market. Sure lastpass let people store passwords easily, but how many consumers bother changing the default password manager in their browser? 3) Investors recognize this pattern and funnel money to the biggest “platform” they can in any given market. I never understood how bad point solutions were from a business standpoint until I worked in the application performance monitoring space. For any given monitoring feature there are dozens to hundreds of small, high quality point solutions targeting one market niche or another - but most customers will simply purchase their preferred all in one solution and forget about the other options.