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Painfully close but wrong. Big fish are almost always eaten by small fish. On the other hand, almost all small fish fail. It's the rare exception among small f

Painfully close but wrong. Big fish are almost always eaten by small fish. On the other hand, almost all small fish fail. It's the rare exception among small fish that bests a big fish. Stated correctly it sounds unremarkable because it is unremarkable. So much for "Leslie's Law". His DEC/IBM comparison shows that he somehow stopped reading the tech press around 1990. Intel's decomposed platform ate them all and opened the door to Linux and open source. Intel still dominates servers, but on the client side has been bested by the system on a chip cpu designs licensed by the mobile vendors. The two big client OSs are of course rooted in open source (iOS is from OSX is from NextStep is from Mach/BSD, and of course Android is Linux). EDIT: Lawtonfogle is absolutely right, so I removed the word "completely" and left "unremarkable". Good point. Also I think most small fish die on their own. Usually because they build the wrong product.

ectoplasm 11y ago
Big fish are almost always eaten by small fish. Small fish are almost always eaten by big fish. At least there's a nice symmetry to it.
- rqebmm 11y ago
  It's a fish-eat-fish world out there...
- mcgwiz 11y ago
  Eh. Small fish eat other small fish. Sometimes they mutually eat each other, to abuse the metaphor.
- sukruh 11y ago
  This reminds me of Agar.io.
- smt88 11y ago
  If small fish get eaten at all. The vast, vast majority don't. They just die. So to rephrase what you're saying: fish that get eaten are eaten by other fish. Not quite as interesting.
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
While it is far less remarkable the way you put it, I wouldn't call it completely unremarkable because it still is remarkable that big fish eat big fish so rarely.
smrtinsert 11y ago
I don't know. I look at the rise of mobile OS's as a good example of small fish taking over.
- bwy 11y ago
  What do you mean by that? You look at Android and iOS and say small fish?
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    When they came out, yeah, Android and iOS were tiny. iOS couldn't even run third-party apps for the first 6 months, and lacked basic features like cut & paste for the first couple years. Android had a clunky UI. Both of them faced the problem of "What can you possibly do on a 4-inch screen with a tiny on-screen keyboard?"
    - nmrm2 11y ago
      I think the article was intended to be about company/firm size. Calling Google or Apple small is kinda wrong ;-) But also, if you interpret it as technology, then it's still pretty wrong to describe the original smartphones as small or simple -- they're not the sort of thing you could slap together and make work. The partnerships and supply chains and software and scale necessary to get smart phones working "well enough" would have been extremely difficult for a small player to pull off.
      - nostrademons 11y ago
        For Android at least, it holds. Android was a 6-person startup when it was acquired by Google. The point, though, isn't the size of the company that sponsors the product or even the size of the team involved in the product itself. It's the product's power level relative to incumbents in the space. When Android and iOS came out, they were both significantly less powerful than the PCs and laptops that were previously used for general-purpose computation. But they had the useful attribute of being able to fit into your pocket. When the platforms came out, mainstream PC vendors didn't even view them as competition, because you obviously cannot do the same things on a phone that you can on a laptop. Many mainstream PC vendors still don't view them as competition. But with new input methods, changing social patterns, and increased hardware power, phones are being used for more and more things that you would previously have had to stick a laptop in a car for. Think of FedEx delivery computers vs. Uber or Instacart.
swalsh 11y ago
Eh, I think it's a matter of perspective. Parents don't care about the millions of sperms that died on the way to fertilize an egg. They only care about the one that made it. You're thinking about it from the perspective of the sperm. I think the authors perspective was from that of the parents.
dean 11y ago
> Big fish are almost always eaten by small fish. On the other hand, almost all small fish fail. I think you are missing the point. This is not a story about all the small fish out there. This is a story about how the big fish die. And I think the author got it right.
biggestbob 11y ago
The article never claimed that all small fish eat big. That's not at all the point of the article.

ectoplasm 11y ago

Big fish are almost always eaten by small fish. Small fish are almost always eaten by big fish. At least there's a nice symmetry to it.

rqebmm 11y ago
It's a fish-eat-fish world out there...
mcgwiz 11y ago
Eh. Small fish eat other small fish. Sometimes they mutually eat each other, to abuse the metaphor.
sukruh 11y ago
This reminds me of Agar.io.
smt88 11y ago
If small fish get eaten at all. The vast, vast majority don't. They just die. So to rephrase what you're saying: fish that get eaten are eaten by other fish. Not quite as interesting.

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

While it is far less remarkable the way you put it, I wouldn't call it completely unremarkable because it still is remarkable that big fish eat big fish so rarely.

smrtinsert 11y ago

I don't know. I look at the rise of mobile OS's as a good example of small fish taking over.

bwy 11y ago
What do you mean by that? You look at Android and iOS and say small fish?
- nostrademons 11y ago
  When they came out, yeah, Android and iOS were tiny. iOS couldn't even run third-party apps for the first 6 months, and lacked basic features like cut & paste for the first couple years. Android had a clunky UI. Both of them faced the problem of "What can you possibly do on a 4-inch screen with a tiny on-screen keyboard?"
  - nmrm2 11y ago
    I think the article was intended to be about company/firm size. Calling Google or Apple small is kinda wrong ;-) But also, if you interpret it as technology, then it's still pretty wrong to describe the original smartphones as small or simple -- they're not the sort of thing you could slap together and make work. The partnerships and supply chains and software and scale necessary to get smart phones working "well enough" would have been extremely difficult for a small player to pull off.
    - nostrademons 11y ago
      For Android at least, it holds. Android was a 6-person startup when it was acquired by Google. The point, though, isn't the size of the company that sponsors the product or even the size of the team involved in the product itself. It's the product's power level relative to incumbents in the space. When Android and iOS came out, they were both significantly less powerful than the PCs and laptops that were previously used for general-purpose computation. But they had the useful attribute of being able to fit into your pocket. When the platforms came out, mainstream PC vendors didn't even view them as competition, because you obviously cannot do the same things on a phone that you can on a laptop. Many mainstream PC vendors still don't view them as competition. But with new input methods, changing social patterns, and increased hardware power, phones are being used for more and more things that you would previously have had to stick a laptop in a car for. Think of FedEx delivery computers vs. Uber or Instacart.

swalsh 11y ago

Eh, I think it's a matter of perspective. Parents don't care about the millions of sperms that died on the way to fertilize an egg. They only care about the one that made it. You're thinking about it from the perspective of the sperm. I think the authors perspective was from that of the parents.

dean 11y ago

> Big fish are almost always eaten by small fish. On the other hand, almost all small fish fail. I think you are missing the point. This is not a story about all the small fish out there. This is a story about how the big fish die. And I think the author got it right.

biggestbob 11y ago

The article never claimed that all small fish eat big. That's not at all the point of the article.