Of course they will. They will make a lower tier product that doesn’t have things that larger companies need - most of the time they keep something like SSO federation into a premium tier.
We're having a discussion on belief at this point. I appreciate your perspective and think, in many cases, your prediction would be right. In others, it won't. There's no determinism to these things.
The point of the discussion for me (can't speak for you) was to ask if there's an opportunity, and I am not deterred to think there is.
Is it easy, no. But it's straight forward to approach from a product perspective.
There's strategies one may deploy to make it harder or more painful for a big company to copy because they'd have to swallow a large number of downsells into the new offering.
Maybe the insight from this thread, is that one must consider high-value low-product-effort features that, often, force upsells in the cloud solution that one could offer in an installable one.
