[danudey]

Learn from their mistakes. Look at the reactions from their customers, and make sure that you ship with their #1 wishlist feature and make sure that feature is emphasized.

This is a good point to emphasize. Let someone else be first to market and make all the mistakes. Learn from their mistakes and respond faster than they can and you can capitalize on their first-to-market advantage.

People generally prefer the most minimal product that actually solves their problem -- only established users want more features.

I'm not entirely convinced of this. People will tend to buy things with more features because it has more features that they might someday want. The key is complexity. If it's simple to use despite those extra features (or because of them), then they're a benefit. If they make the product harder to use or slower, it's a drawback.

In Japan, the cell phone industry is the logical extreme of this. People cycle phones at ridiculous intervals to get more and better features, most of which don't work well or at all, and all of which make the phone more complicated to use. Yet still, it's a status symbol that you paid for a non-functional accelerometer that your friend doesn't have.