In Technology, Small Fish (Almost Always) Eat Big Fish - Leslie’s Law
For decades it was inconceivable that anyone could compete against IBM’s absolute dominance of the computing industry. It owned 65% of the market, with the rest divvied up between what were then known as the “BUNCH” companies — Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell. They each had their own proprietary hardware and software stacks and kept to themselves. Everyone was fat, dumb, and happy.--
When you start looking at the world through this lens — that when small meets large, small almost always wins — you see it everywhere, across all tech sectors. It's so prevalent, in fact, that I consider it an industry law, in this case, “Leslie’s Law.”
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One sterling example is in the CRM
(customer relationship management) space. For as long as anyone could
remember, the market was owned by Siebel. It was big, offering an
incredibly complex solution that had to be installed for customers on
their servers, licensed in bulk, with tons of training and customer
service attached. Sounds unwieldy, but it was the norm, and everyone
needed it.
Then along came a company called Salesforce.com.
Instead of having to buy hundreds of licenses, customer companies could
pay per employee using Salesforce.com, and use it in their web browsers
hassle free. They became the automatic choice for the many young
companies that couldn’t afford to do anything but start small with SaaS.
