> But again - the hard part is not cloning the product, it's stealing your customers. People don't seem to be focused on the hard parts.

Big companies seem to be bad at innovating but really, really good at enterprise sales.

I don’t know if that’s necessarily true. I do think that a big part of enterprise sales involves building a comprehensive solution that works well within the customer’s ecosystem. Start-ups usually tend to build point products, which have value, but are still missing functionality (even if that functionality is not scintillating) that customers really desire to easily deploy and maintain solutions. Also, customers do care about things like stability of their vendors and the level of available support.

I'm not saying it is always the case but does it not match your experience that big orgs like Microsoft are much better at navigating the enterprise sales process than a typical startup? Not to mention how many of those startups are just answering security questionnaires and other procurement gates with AI.

I definitely agree w/ you that big organizations are generally better able to navigate the enterprise sales process, but mainy trying to say that customers might choose to work with a bigger company's products for reasons that typically go way beyond that (e.g., better integrations, support resources, etc.).

I've seen big companies manage to duplicate startup-like culture with small teams internally. Weird things like directors handling builds and source control duties. 12 hour days, working weekends.

These teams said that per man-hour they brought more value to the company than any other team. (But you know, they all say that)

Yeah, and the big guys can't steal your customers. What a crazy idea.

The point is - they're going to do that anyways if they want to. Owning the LLM platforms makes it marginally cheaper to do so.

It's not the risk it's being made out to be.

Absolutely. The fact that they know your app better than you do, and that they can revoke your ability to develop it at any moment, those are just details. Those things won't change the game at all.

Unless you're using their API (in which case there's always platform risk, same as before), this is not an issue. There are lots of half assed implementations of ideas by the big companies that smaller companies run circles around, Innovator's Dilemma was literally written about this.

In my opinion Christensen wasn't talking about outsourcing your entire development process to a competitor with much deeper pockets, giving them the ability to turn off your development at will [1], and then running rings around them. I'm sure you're familiar with his story about Dell and Asus. This is worse.

[1] Unless you're assuming that you maintain control over your technology while outsourcing most of the development thinking to a rented AI? Times have changed, and the API is not the only issue anymore.

What is the issue? Local models still exist and will continue to exist, and even if they don't, good old fashioned hand coding will never go away. The point is even AI companies are run by people and one company cannot make every product well, there are always gaps in the market that are exploitable.

I don't think the risk is that they copy your app.

The risk is that they make the category a built-in feature in something people already use. At that point, copying the product and taking the customers start to look like the same problem.

Yup, pre-cog Sherlocking. The mass keeps accreting towards the already too large players.

> But again - the hard part is not cloning the product, it's stealing your customers.

Yes. A Red Hat, a Microsoft -- these companies have processes, organizational structure, politics, friction, etc. They might like your products, but replicating them might not be easy for reasons that have nothing to do with how easy it is given the freedom to do it. Small shops with vision might well have a bright future, for a while, maybe.