In Technology, Small Fish Almost Always Eat Big Fish • Hacker News Board

Re: In Technology, Small Fish Almost Always Eat Big Fish

#31

Post by smt88 » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 6:03 PM UTC

ectoplasm wrote: post #10

paulsutter wrote: post #9

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 open…

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.

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.

Re: In Technology, Small Fish Almost Always Eat Big Fish

#32

Post by dean » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 6:10 PM UTC

paulsutter wrote: post #9

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 open…

> 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.

Re: In Technology, Small Fish Almost Always Eat Big Fish

#33

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 6:15 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #26

nmrm2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eno…

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…

In other news PC sales fell off a cliff in the last quarter.

I think most PC vendors totally get that smartphones are direct competition. What they don't get is what to do about it - which is understandable, because that problem probably doesn't have a solution. ("Better PCs" or "PCs that are more like tablets" are clearly not the answer. Apple solves the problem with status, branding, a complete product ecosystem, and frostings of technological sugar. The generic PC industry doesn't have those options.)

But this underlines the point - you can't compete by producing another version of current technology. You can only do it by simplifying, packaging, commodifying, and finding new markets.

This doesn't always work if the markets aren't really there (see also: Apple Watch). The challenge is to find a niche that has real customer demand, not produce a clever project in search of a market - which is probably the main startup failure mode.

Re: In Technology, Small Fish Almost Always Eat Big Fish

#34

Post by biggestbob » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 9:55 PM UTC

paulsutter wrote: post #9

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 open…

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