[donatj]

The biggest joke of the entire things is that no one wins by being first anymore. It is not the 1990s.

If anything, you win by being a good second. Facebook won because it watched MySpace mistakes and fixed them.

There is even less value in being first with this AI-driven nonsense. The first mover just creates the template everyone else feeds into an LLM. You do the hard work. Someone else collects the reward.

[ChiMan]

>If anything, you win by being a good second.

More specifically, winning often means being last. Case in point: Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo!, Infoseek... then Google. Let others rush around doing your prototyping.

[kalb_almas]

Google didn't win because it was last. It was last because it won!

[ChiMan]

Only partly true. Look more carefully. Page and Brin devised their product as a response to other search engines—-which they couldn’t have done by rushing into search engines. For them, given their ages, their timing was probably happy accident. Still, why not imitate successful accident?

[Seattle3503]

It's always in the last place you look.

[Towaway69]

You mean, Google lasts because it won one.

[kreyenborgi]

Xerox to Apple

[toast0]

I can't think of very many first movers that really had an advantage. Maybe if you get a lot of essential patents. Or you get very lucky with timing and capture a large market nobody noticed wasn't serviced.

But so many of today's market leaders were late entrants. Sometimes many years late.

[drunkboxer]

JIRA?

[toast0]

JIRA is from 2002, Bugzilla is from 1998, GNATS is from 1992.

[abrookewood]

Not sure that this is universally true. Youtube, Uber, Airbnb and others all have massive first-mover advantages.

[abrookewood]

OK, so apparently YouTube was not a good example !

[watwut]

Ubers advantage was selling under price for years and being willing to break laws worldwide. And before someone brings up medallions, Uber was selling under price and breaking labor laws where in countries where taxis worked as a normal competitive market.

They did not had to be first. They were not first either.

[goatlover]

Didn't Vimeo come out a year before?

[latexr]

Google Video, with the might of Google behind it, launched three months before YouTube.