[adventured]

Jaiku, Pownce, Gowalla, Bing/MSN search, Posterous, Windows Phone

There are tons of them. You'll see a lot of responses that claim all of these companies didn't die due to moving slowly, but for other reasons - that will also always be true though, even in cases where a startup moved too slow. For example, Windows Phone was both backwards, and slow to match the iPhone once it became obvious consumers loved touch.

In many consumer spaces, it's: 'winner take most.' If your competition gets to critical adoption first, most of the time you're toast. So even if Gowalla was growing slowly, they were too far behind. If your competitor takes 60% of the market, you've previously been growing fast but are now growing slowly, and you're now down to 14% of the market - the outcome is most likely that your future growth will be extremely difficult, and eventually you'll burn vast resources just trying to acquire each point of market share thereafter. Microsoft and Google have both delivered rare, extremely expensive examples of this behavior over a long-term basis (in search for Microsoft and social for Google), funded by their prior dominant products.

[michel-slm]

I still miss Jaiku. I wonder if they would have survived if either they didn't get acquired by Google, or if Google keep supporting them instead of acquihiring.