

Ask HN: Which startups with traction eventually lost out to slower behemoths? - syedkarim

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?<p>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?
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staunch
We 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
Some 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/>

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
I 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.

