I think the "XYZ Big Corp might smash us" fear is a corollary to the "winner-take-all, and first-to-market wins" fear, which itself is a corollary to the "ideas are everything" paradigm. Needless to say, history does not bear this thinking out in the tech space.

More than in almost any other industry, in technology, the best implementation for the right segment at the right time usually wins. That "right time" might mean first-to-market, but often it doesn't. Sometimes the market needs a first-mover to familiarize people with the concept and establish the pain points with that concept, which the second- or third-mover then perfects.

As for XYZ Big Corp, it's true that they'll always have resource advantages. But they've also got resource disadvantages in the form of corporate politics, bureaucracy, prioritizations and allocations of capital and talent, and so forth. Plus, one should not underestimate the advantage that a handful of uberpassionate-bordering-on-obsessive, working-all-hours hackers will have over an equivalent handful of corporate clock-punchers assigned to a project.

I think fear of big players is sort of orthogonal to the thoroughly debunked "ideas are everything" notion. Even if you are the first mover in a given market, you might afraid that Google could release a competing product tomorrow and eat your lunch.

In terms of Google, those fears are pretty unfounded. Google releases new products all the time that fail to gain traction.

> A possibly more precise way of expressing this thought is: "Competition from big players doesn't necessarily equate to a death sentence to small players".

Absolutely. The key point here is that you avoid being squashed by the competition by being better than the competition. Just because the competition is a big company doesn't mean that you can't be better than them.

But, unless I misunderstood the article, competition was not even a factor. The GDrive didn't exist then and it doesn't exist now.

Yes. There's always grass to eat between the feet of the elephants.