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by ink_13 10 days ago
Curious parallel to iRobot (Roomba): first mover in new product segment, became genericized name for things in that segment, in the end, (possibly in GoPro's case) could not compete in that segment
4 comments

Basically the problem with American corporate thinking.

Make a great product, stop innovating, and then spend the rest of the life of you company trying to extra as many dollars as possible from the first mover goodwill. Spend as few of those dollar possible innovating or improving the product. Or if you are innovating, it's in ways to break your old products to try and trick your customers into buying more.

The core of the problem is that those who own businesses only care about extracting money from stock and investment. The best way to do that isn't making a good product. In fact, it's practically the opposite.

American corporate thinking is mostly about acquisitions to innovate. So this is more or less _not_ American corporate thinking.
I got a Insta 360 go 3S camera recently and damn the tech is amazing. What's sus is the mandatory phone activation/allowing permissions. Once I activated the camera I deleted the app.
Yes, I have X4. It has amazing hardware, but the activation thing is such a shame. I really wish it were illegal.

And the proprietary video format. I want an open source converter but chances are unlikely.

insv files? there are plenty of tools on github that can interact with these files and convert them to standard formats
I just bought an x5 to use with my moto and play around with.

Right now trying to figure out the aesthetics of 360. For one, everything that in real life looks huge, is not so impressive with 360 until you get really close. But at close distance even a beer can looks like a building.

Ha funny I see those on cars eg. Mustang GTs playing around in the streets

I think it's useful if you have that chase view where you pan around and show the other cars/motorcycles around you

Like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D65gz3UfvhE

Did more or less this with my mother-in-law and her Echo Dot.
it's not the first nor the last case. Another excellent similar case was Nokia.
It's interesting because in software it's usually the opposite. First to market is the winner even with an inferior product. See whatsapp and telegram
Not a great comparison; those apps have serious network effects.
>First to market is the winner even with an inferior product. See whatsapp and telegram

I don't think so. We use Excel not Lotus 1-2-3. iOS and Android, not Palm and Blackberry OSes or whatever mobile shit MS had first. We use Gmail not AOL. Google not Lycos or Altavista. Chrome not Netscape. Facebook and co, not Friendster or MySpace. Word not WordPerfect. Access not dBase. And regarding WhatsApp it's not ICQ or MSN Messenger that we use.

I’d suggest that a whole bunch of those were not improvements.
Which is orthogonal to what I'm responding to, which was that:

"First to market is the winner even with an inferior product. See whatsapp and telegram"

My point is that this not true, and that "first to market" usually losses.

If anything, what you suggest, reinforces it even more, since it implies that not only "first to market" often loses to a superior product, but even to players an inferior one.

I worded that inarticulately. Some of those first movers were absolute trash, though I agree that later and more commercially successful products are not always better.