A big reason is that competing with them on equal footing is a monumental task. You are working against network effects, heavy duty marketing, integrations into other products and a whole army of developers.

Developing the product itself isn't the reason.

But network effects and marketing are irrelevant for products that can't be used in your country because they violate local laws. If some Google product can't legally be used in the EU, then it has zero network effects there and Google wouldn't waste money marketing it there.

Also, the competing EU-based service might be strong competitors to the ones in the U.S., among people like me who are privacy conscious. I don't use Google services, but I'd be happy to consider using GDPR-compliant services based in Europe.

I think you misread the comment thread. You are just restating my point. I agree with you. I was talking about the current (previous?) situation, where US and EU companies are on equal footing on the european market.

The big companies buy the little companies as soon as they look like they may be a threat. It’s not monumental or hard to compete with them.

I think you are underestimating the effort required to produce an suite of office products.

Libre office is a third option, but does it have much usage? Why or why not?

Could you sustain a development team capable of creating this with a limited market and revenue stream?

> Could you sustain a development team capable of creating this with a limited market and revenue stream?

Market wouldn't be limited and potential revenue streams would be huge. So yeah. Just as a reminder, this is still assuming that there is a significant window where the big options aren't available for Europeans.

Sorry I wasn’t clear. The reason there are no competing products isn’t because it is hard. It’s because they keep getting bought as soon as someone does “good enough”

They don't have to sell to them though, right?

Would you turn down a "name your price or we'll run your business into the ground wink wink" (by disabling app store, never getting on the first page to results, etc). Not saying that is what is going on or anything...

In most cases the underdog is running on investment funds, and has handed over a significant amount of the company control to investors. When a buy is proposed, those investors have to weigh the really quick (probably really large) profit of selling versus playing the long game fighting an uphill battle against the giant.

This is how promising companies are swallowed by the market leaders.