This article would be greatly improved by some case studies, illustrating how prevous 800lb gorillas had been beaten, and how their moats turned out so much shallower than they seemed.
The closest he comes to examples are Microsoft Office (admittedly, few competitors, but a massive moat, and when he wrote in 2012 already mobilising in the face of a big challenge from Google), Flickr (already being killed by the social networking startups he disparages), or Salesforce (competing CRM products are everywhere).
I'd love to have my mind changed with fleshed-out examples, but without them this reads like a banal expression of the conventional wisdom of the time (incumbents are vulnerable! Disrupt disrupt disrupt!).
Perhaps that's particularly obvious because the conventional wisdom has shifted. Today, the big 5 tech companies are deeply entrenched, and we've watched them each see off a couple of generations of upstarts, while remaining awake and engaged in fierce competition with each other. So an argument like this needs a bit more evidence to be convincing.
I must have misunderstood the OP. I thought it was about launching things like InDesign to displace established market dominators like Word by providing a better tool.
The closest he comes to examples are Microsoft Office (admittedly, few competitors, but a massive moat, and when he wrote in 2012 already mobilising in the face of a big challenge from Google), Flickr (already being killed by the social networking startups he disparages), or Salesforce (competing CRM products are everywhere).
I'd love to have my mind changed with fleshed-out examples, but without them this reads like a banal expression of the conventional wisdom of the time (incumbents are vulnerable! Disrupt disrupt disrupt!).
Perhaps that's particularly obvious because the conventional wisdom has shifted. Today, the big 5 tech companies are deeply entrenched, and we've watched them each see off a couple of generations of upstarts, while remaining awake and engaged in fierce competition with each other. So an argument like this needs a bit more evidence to be convincing.