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Historically, this is probably one of the easiest times for a small player to compete with the giants. Is it really harder to compete with big tech than it was with Rockefeller's Standard Oil, Carnegie's steel industry, Vanderbilt's railroads, AT&T's national phone network?

It's much easier to compete against tech and we have evidence as small players like TikTok, and even Snapchat have done it successfully.



Sure you can name a couple of unicorns, but tiktok and snapchat themselves occupy spaces where there are maybe 2-3 competitors at most.


Is it beneficial for there to be more than 2-3 competitors? That may be sufficient from a market POV.

There are also areas that are ripe for competition. For example gmail hasn't changed/innovated in nearly a decade.

Atlassian's Jira is the leader for bug tracking but is pretty terrible.


> Is it beneficial for there to be more than 2-3 competitors? That may be sufficient from a market POV.

Lol I don't know what markets you are talking about, but definitely not from an economist point of view.


Interesting, is there an optimal number of competitors from an economist pov?


I saw a paper once saying that in any market where the top four competitors controlled more than 60% of the market, they'd act as a de-facto cartel. (I wish I could find it again).




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