I've been observing a lot of talk around the ruthless battles between big-tech companies and startups. Big-tech companies can use their distribution to turn new products into features. Their moats give them genuine dominance over their industry. However, I do believe there's a workaround strategy. Startups have been created earlier and they will continue to exist and beat older giants.

When you trace back to the early winners of the tech industry, specifically IBM, you'll realize the co-relation between their moats and influence over the industry. After a decade or two, when Microsoft clearly started winning the computing market, IBM hadn't lost it's moat, it lost it's influence in the market. Mainframes were still used (till date) but IBM lost it's position as a dominant threat to anybody else who entered the tech market. Microsoft didn't beat IBM at their own game (Mainframes) rather they made their game irrelevant. Microsoft targeted the consumers who didn't engage with the mainframes. The PC was much more relevant to these people.

This story continues when Microsoft dominated the PC market for almost 2 decades. Another startup called Google came about which moved the throne from PC to the web. Google didn't win over Microsoft by beating them at their own game (PCs) rather it made it irrelevant. Microsoft didn't lose out, they just lost their influence.

You can map such influence cycles across almost any startup that made it big. The best way to break a big-tech moat is to change the medium and make it irrelevant to most customers. In Microsoft's case, they actually benefited because of Google. They lost their dominance but their sales increased because a lot of people got a reason to buy a client machine to engage with the web. It's useful to figure out the behavioral and technological changes that will allow your startup to make previous dominance irrelevant before you start competing for market share.