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Ask HN: Which startups with traction eventually lost out to slower behemoths?
When talking about startups, I always hear, "What happens when Google wants to offer this product? That tiny startup will get crushed." But how often does this actually happen?
In which cases has a startup with a solid product and increasing traction gone bankrupt after Google/Microsoft/Facebook/etc finally entered the market with a competing product?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- staunch 14y agoWe are in a great position to witness an almost perfect experiment. Dropbox vs Google Drive. It's especially great because Dropbox is the best kind of startup, and Google is the best kind of big company.
- taligent 14y agoSome experiment. Dropbox and Google Drive are two of the buggiest, slowest, highest CPU using pieces of software I've used in a long time. As for startups Dropbox has all this money and has done almost nothing with it. The product is almost identical to version 1.0. Yet you have companies like Evernote truly innovating with far less money. See Evernote 5: http://evernote.com/evernote/whats_new/mac/ http://evernote.com/evernote/whats_new/mac/ Google needs to stop being so evil (privacy and anti-competitive practices) before they will be the best kind of big company again.
- true_religion 14y agoI think the worst thing that Google ever did was associate their company with "don't be evil" because everytime their name comes up someone will start speaking about how X action of theirs is 'evil'. I understand you may not agree with everything they do, but that doesn't make it 'evil'. Evil has to be more.
- eshvk 14y agoEhh...I keep hearing about all these Dropbox competitors that are going to defeat it. I would love to see who would though, Dropbox has me hooked on way too much and it worries me to see a tiny company with so much of a data lock on. On the other hand, their UI personally has been spot on. I have been on the Google Drive side of the Google Doc A/B that Google has been doing for a while and I find their interface confusing, especially because they appear to wish to minimize folders as much as possible, making it difficult to transition between company shared folders and local copies. At times, we have even lost the folder tree structure, forcing us to go through a painful process of resending permissions for all the files we controlled and recreating this from scratch. My team PM had a not fun day that day :(