I'm wondering really. Big players are usually less focused and...

I'm wondering really. Big players are usually less focused and engaged than smaller ones. Big players could have made the graphene unit faster than FGR but they didn't. IIM are at the forefront of graphene functionalising and they are a very small.
Dropbox had seemingly no chances against Google on cloud computing (see Chris Sacca interview on Tim Ferriss blog), but they pulled it off.
The fact that small players are more focused on one technology, have more skin in the game is that they tend to move much faster. This should not be overlooked.