Personally I find both sites irritating, so I'm sure there is an opening here, but I'd love to hear what he thinks it is.
It's also how residential search existed 7 years ago. There were MLS systems that were mostly just used by realtors to keep track of availabilities. Zillow, Trulia, and Streeteasy liberated all that fragmented data into usable search experiences.
We're 'liberating commercial real estate data.' Which means, anyone can search for free. Once the data is freely available, then companies everywhere can compete for traffic with user experience, customer service, value-added features,etc—all the things you as a customer want these companies to be competing on.
In a world where data is still subscription based, companies compete with lock-in contracts and exclusivity clauses and nobody wins. For proof, check out the design of the big incumbents. It's more than just bad, it's not caring.
We may win, we may not. But we believe that within the next 5 years, the internet will have its usual effect on commercial real estate. And we welcome it for no other reason then we also need to search for office space.
Click through to the link, ctrl/cmd+F "loopnet" / "costar" ... see what he thinks.
The article also mentions: this is not for commercial property, just leasable spaces, which is another differentiator between those giants.