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Ask HN: What are examples of startups that died by the hands of Big Tech?
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'.
Sure, there are also examples where the startups did not exactly die Dropbox/Box Vs Big Tech storage.
- rapphil 4y agoRedhat
- trifit 4y agoVine
- pHollda 4y agoNow reframed the question. Vine isn't an example.
- polski-g 4y agoEvery other ticketing system vs JIRA. Every game market platform vs Steam.
- maccard 4y agoI don't think either of these are good examples. There are plenty of project management tools that have existed alongside jira - Asana, Basecamp, pivotal all have healthy userbases. Even Trello, although they're atlassian now. Same for games - gog, epic store, humble store, ms store. You may not like them, but they're around and booming.
- sloaken 4y agoBorland VS Microsoft Netscape Navigator VS MS IE
- dtagames 4y agoI worked at Borland when they were bigger than Microsoft. The hubris was amazing, a nice complement to their indifference at what MS was doing with programming languages and office software.
- chasil 4y agoIn obtaining Dave Cutler, Microsoft acquired a phenomenally good kernel engineer. The small team that accompanied him to Microsoft was a lethal threat to the PC software industry. Cutler had already delivered an enterprise kernel that carved a market out of IBM. Windows NT was likewise going to rip market share away from anyone in conflict with Microsoft. I don't know the exact timing when Microsoft dumped Xenix, but I know that it was close.
- Wistar 4y ago"Ballmer’s viewpoint is more succinct: 'There wouldn’t be a Microsoft today without Dave.'" Nicely written 2016 article about Cutler: "The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler’s five-decade-long quest for quality." https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-computer-industry-luminaries-salute-dave-cutlers-five-decade-long-quest-for-quality/ https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-c...
- scarface74 4y agoPeople look at Netscape through rose colored glasses. But it was never a good product. Back in the day, people use to judge the robustness of their operating system by how well it could handle a Netscape crash.
- Throwawayaerlei 4y agoBingo. The single reason I switched to IE about the time of version 3 is that it just didn't crash very often. Again, Microsoft being better at writing software that works, see my longer essay in this topic. Like Boeing buying MacDonald Douglas, this part of Netscape was captured by the executives of a failing company who were better at politics and didn't care about minor details like the quality of the product. Here the existing product, as I recall they focused on the great rewrite from scratch which eventually became Firefox. Also see how Friendster failed after the VC types ousted the founder and focused on doing deals with other companies, were not interested in reports from those below them that it was taking tens of minutes to even log onto the site.
- wilde 4y agoThere’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. https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/4/18651190/apple-ios-13-mac-os-catalina-third-party-apps-products-copy-wwdc-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/4/18651190/apple-ios-13-mac-...
- ternus 4y agoSlack is a strange example here, as it certainly seems to be thriving; do you think it's lost/dead?
- hthrowaway5 4y agoI agree with you. There is something about Salesforce in particular I feel people don't trust to be a good steward of acquired products. I don't feel it's deserved even though I worked for an acquired company that certainly did fail because of their leadership—I think we were the exception though. For Mulesoft, Tableau, Quip: I don't think it's clear these would be successful companies on their own. They paid a ton of money for Slack and need to protect that investment. Is there a clear example of Salesforce failing at an acquisition? Or do people see the examples I gave above differently than I do?
- gonehome 4y agoMy take is that once salesforce acquires a product at best it’ll remain stagnant and unchanged. It’ll never get better, the smart people working on it quit and go elsewhere.
- 0des 4y agoSalesforce is the rich guy at the table eating off of other people's plates and making people uneasy. Bloated, bald, disgusting, but just enough money to keep being relevant.
- tomhoward 4y agoSlack is a great product/company, but as Parker Conrad of Rippling explains in this podcast [1] (about 13 minutes in), Microsoft has been able to fend off Slack with an arguably inferior product, just by having an ecosystem that so many companies/orgs are already fully bought into. [1] https://podcasts.apple.com/tt/podcast/20vc-ripplings-parker-conrad-on-why-vc-founder-marriage/id958230465?i=1000518634685 https://podcasts.apple.com/tt/podcast/20vc-ripplings-parker-...
- loloquwowndueo 4y ago“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. This is a great read about the rise and fall of WordPerfect. http://www.wordplace.com/ap/ http://www.wordplace.com/ap/
- scarface74 4y agoThey were “crushed” because they released shitty versions of their applications once GUIs took over
- serallak 4y agoWordperfect at least was born before Ms/DOS. It was a viable competitor of Microsoft word in the Ms/DOS era, but did not manage the transition to the windows era.
- Throwawayaerlei 4y agoEvery one of those cited companies crushed themselves first. Lotus followed the common pattern of burning out and losing their technical talent after they first shipped, also made too large a bet on OS/2. Ashton-Tate did a little better maybe but also lost its ability to write software that worked, which was much more difficult back in those days. Borland and WordPerfect found it much more difficult than they expected to transition their products to Windows 3.x. The latter had too much pride in their collection of DOS printer drivers, but what really killed them was releasing something that passed the bar of not crashing, but would per a lawyer I worked with regularly drop all your tables and figures to the bottom of the document. Borland was slow to get their stuff working on Windows, was late to bundling an Office equivalent according to a marketing guy from there I once worked with, and had the bad portent of the edifice complex: http://www.krjda.com/Sites/BorlandInfo1.html http://www.krjda.com/Sites/BorlandInfo1.html To this day, well it's after they started going beyond their start in computer languages, their 808x C compiler for example blew away the competition when it finally launched, we ding Microsoft for their quality problems, but especially in the days Gates ran it one of the "secrets" of their success was writing software that basically worked, didn't crash on you etc. This makes it easy to beat competitors who lose that ability, or aren't as good at it.
- aaronbrethorst 4y agoSeems quite likely that Clubhouse would still be just as irrelevant if Twitter had not launched Spaces. Clubhouse feels more like a fad than roadkill.
- hthrowaway5 4y agoStrange 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. Snapchat is probably a good example of a company that made the right move by not being acquired.
- matt_heimer 4y agoI loved Dropbox when it first came out. Now I have Google Drive as part of my paid storage for Gmail, iCloud Drive for Apple devices, and OneDrive as part of my Office 365 subscription. I can't imagine any reason to pay for Dropbox.
- bwb 4y agoRead about google shutting down accounts and never restoring it.
- Throwawayaerlei 4y agoAlso see Google+ failing to accomplish much of anything positive in part by insisting on True Names like Facebook which it was trying to kill, and shutting down some accounts that failed to do this to their satisfaction. For extra credit, the leader of the Google+ effort didn't use his True Name. To extend this to the theme of the topic, while Google obviously displaced a lot of incumbents starting with the AltaVista search engine, do we expect this to happen in the future?
- matt_heimer 4y agoI know, I use Takeout on a regular basis, backup phone photos and such to a NAS, and my primary Gmail is a custom domain (I've started paying) that I could switch to another email provider if needed.
- scarface74 4y agoI would never trust Google for anything critical for that reason. Google Drive is just another backup for my photos.
- mylons 4y agoheroku getting bought by salesforce
- beamatronic 4y agoPalm, Dropcam, Nest
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoWhile 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.
- scarface74 4y agoAnd YouTube was about to get sued into oblivion. Even today, YouTube is barely profitable and would be a horrible stand-alone business.
- thetinguy 4y agoYup. And people don’t realize that a lot of problem with YouTube like the content Id system come from that settlement.
- fullstackwife 4y agoHipchat
- ec109685 4y agoThey got crushed by another startup, slack.
- cellis 4y agoBasecamp for sure
- hadeohedron 4y agoWhile it was more of a tech retailer than a tech company, Blockbuster qualifies.
- scarface74 4y agoThere is a much longer story about why Blockbuster failed. When it was split off from Viacom, they saddled it with $1 billion in debt as some type of financial engineering.
- klyrs 4y agoYour 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.
- synu 4y agoLocal independent computer shops, where people would hang out almost like an impromptu local computer club are a real loss. I miss them a lot.
- jmclnx 4y agoyes, I agree
- gonehome 4y agoWhat decade did those exist? The 80s?
- klyrs 4y agoIn my experience (I think there's some regional variation here) they were still thriving in the mid/late 90s, and I continued to frequent local computer shops until around the mid aughts. For me, there were three major factors: computers got more standardized, so one didn't need to consult a guru to make a decent system; documentation went online, see above; and finally companies like NewEgg just crushed it in terms of inventory that local shops couldn't compete with. They could special-order whatever parts you wanted, but that was slower and more expensive.
- gonehome 4y agoInteresting - I think I must have just missed them, too bad because they sound cool.
- ImKevinArcher 4y agoI 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(https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/02/facebook-earnings-meta/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/02/faceboo...). Maybe in a couple of years, TikTok (ByteDance) will be the next big tech out there.
- Throwawayaerlei 4y agoIn reference to the recent product manager shuffling at Twitter it was mentioned on HN that they killed a TikTok like video product of their's that was on fire in the good way, and I think it was said TikTok benefited from this sooner or later. Continues my theme that a lot of these examples start with a failure by a company.
- tyrantalope 4y agoSurely it's a reference to twitter buying out vine, and killing it off for a strange twitter equivalent that got axed pretty quick?
- singron 4y agoGoogle Cloud/kubernetes vs Docker Inc. 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.
- singron 4y agoA 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. I think a lot of times they would rather just buy the company than hope that they can somehow be more innovative. Maybe Facebook/Instagram vs Snapchat?
- scarface74 4y agoBigTech no more “gives away” products than anyone else. It’s part of a bundle. If you take the DropBox example, Jobs called out DropBox as a “feature not a product” years before Office 365/OneDrive, iCloud Drive, and Google Drive were a thing. Microsoft is making money hand over fist on Office365.
- jmclnx 4y agoClassifies, 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.
- programmer_dude 4y agoA counter example startup killing a big tech company: flipkart.com bought ebay.in and essentially killed it. F*king c*ts.
- seattle_spring 4y agoFaking cats?
- programmer_dude 4y agoExactly :)
- cheez0r 4y agoFlickr. Losing to nothing except terrible leadership and ham-fisted attempts to monetize.
- jonjacky 4y agoDelicious, 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. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
- sys_64738 4y agoRed Hat.
- WalterGR 4y agoJust 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.
- smoldesu 4y agoJuicero. They never stood a chance next to Big Blender...