So to rephrase what you're saying: fish that get eaten are eaten by other fish. Not quite as interesting.

I think you are missing the point. This is not a story about all the small fish out there. This is a story about how the big fish die. And I think the author got it right.

Calling Google or Apple small is kinda wrong ;-)

But also, if you interpret it as technology, then it's still pretty wrong to describe the original smartphones as small or simple -- they're not the sort of thing you could slap together and make work. The partnerships and supply chains and software and scale necessary to get smart phones working "well enough" would have been extremely difficult for a small player to pull off.

The point, though, isn't the size of the company that sponsors the product or even the size of the team involved in the product itself. It's the product's power level relative to incumbents in the space. When Android and iOS came out, they were both significantly less powerful than the PCs and laptops that were previously used for general-purpose computation. But they had the useful attribute of being able to fit into your pocket. When the platforms came out, mainstream PC vendors didn't even view them as competition, because you obviously cannot do the same things on a phone that you can on a laptop. Many mainstream PC vendors still don't view them as competition. But with new input methods, changing social patterns, and increased hardware power, phones are being used for more and more things that you would previously have had to stick a laptop in a car for. Think of FedEx delivery computers vs. Uber or Instacart.

I think most PC vendors totally get that smartphones are direct competition. What they don't get is what to do about it - which is understandable, because that problem probably doesn't have a solution. ("Better PCs" or "PCs that are more like tablets" are clearly not the answer. Apple solves the problem with status, branding, a complete product ecosystem, and frostings of technological sugar. The generic PC industry doesn't have those options.)

But this underlines the point - you can't compete by producing another version of current technology. You can only do it by simplifying, packaging, commodifying, and finding new markets.

This doesn't always work if the markets aren't really there (see also: Apple Watch). The challenge is to find a niche that has real customer demand, not produce a clever project in search of a market - which is probably the main startup failure mode.

So a big fish ate a small fish?

Also, Android wasn't successful because it was small. Android was successful because it was bought by a big company that could use its size and capital to build the brands and partnerships necessary to succeed in the space.

Finally, msartphone provides didn't initially follow the advice at the end of the article. Smartphones were definitely serving the high end of the market for a long time.