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Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

It's a fish-eat-fish world out there...

Eh. Small fish eat other small fish. Sometimes they mutually eat each other, to abuse the metaphor.

This reminds me of Agar.io.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

What do you mean by that? You look at Android and iOS and say small fish?

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?"

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.

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.

Essentially what you're saying in this post is that new products emerge over time and cannibalize the market for old products. Not exactly an earth-shattering observation, nor one that's unique to the past 50 (or 500) years. Which is probably why it's (hopefully) not the observation Leslie was attaching his name to...

> Android was a 6-person startup when it was acquired by Google.

So a big fish ate a small fish?

Also, Android wasn't successful because it was small. Android was successful because it was bought by a big company that could use its size and capital to build the brands and partnerships necessary to succeed in the space.

Finally, msartphone provides didn't initially follow the advice at the end of the article. Smartphones were definitely serving the high end of the market for a long time.

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.

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