[GSimon]

Not the most airtight examples. Dropbox was first to market with an innovative service, they've been losing market share ever since Google Drive which now has 25%+ of the market. Netflix was also an innovative service that was first to market. So now there's a new monopoly type of a company who dominates a new market > cable tv. Smaller company can't oust bigger ones unless it is actually possible for them to #1. Out innovate and implement a better service and #2. Hope the monopolies don't catch on to your idea and overwhelm it with their resources (i.e what Blockbuster could have done by adapting an online model). Those 2 critical circumstances don't have all that often.

[ghaff]

In the case of Netflix, there are also some distinctions between their strategy and both Google's and Amazon's strategies that can't easily be erased.

Netflix has a 100% subscription model that includes original content plus enough licensed content (mostly TV) to fill things out.

Google is basically an engineering organization (ADDED: that makes money through advertising) that probably doesn't have a lot of interest in becoming a studio or in licensing a lot of content.

Amazon wants to offer subscription video as part of a broader bundle at a price they want to be attractive even for people who don't use the subscription video a lot. And they also want to sell video a la carte whether online or as disks.