In fairness, by that logic nothing would ever get done. Microsoft? You're never going to win over IBM. Xerox? You'll always be ancillary to Kodak. GM? Ford is already there. The Fugger's Banking company? Good luck against the Venetians and the Florentines. Same old story. At the end of the day, you either try something new or you don't.

Only if they don't have a good answer to the question.

> In fairness, by that logic nothing would ever get done.

Or it will get done by people who have thought long and hard about how they are going to compete with the giants, rather than someone naïve sap.

The fact that the question is being asked does not imply that there are no good answers to it, but it is unlikely that someone who hasn't spent time considering how to improve on the incumbents is going to beat them.

Indeed, but nobody (I certainly wasn't) was advocating to not do your homework and evaluate your risk. Sometimes, however, things just happen, for example James Simons stumbled upon the industry by chance. How many companies were motivated by killer instinct? Did Gates want to kill IBM? Did Xerox plan to kill Kodak (they didn't but they serendipitously started a revolution)?

Dropbox vs OneDrive or Google Drive could be a better example here.