Is First-Mover Advantage a Myth? (with graphs)

I know one of the guys from Dell's early days (he was in charge of DOS and Windows 3.1) ... he said their strategy was to definitely NOT be "first mover" ; instead they focused on being "fast follower", as soon as a technology was starting to gain adoption in the marketplace Dell would try to come out with an offering for it.

This may not work in all cases, but it sure worked for Dell...

A good article, but not a new theory.

Two schools of thought regarding optimal competitive strategy:

(1) "Traditional" economic input/output model: first-mover is a definite advantage, especially if being "first to market" allows a company to put up barriers to entry (or to influence any of the other "five forces") in the traditional economic model. Example would be patenting new technology.

(2) "Hypercompetitive" model: becoming more apparent in the digital age, and especially pertainent to web-only companies. Rather than "reacting" to moves of competitors, firms in a hypercompetitive market must predict and prepare for competitive moves from their rivals.

It's true, there are no first mover advantages on the web anymore. If you have an idea that doesn't exist already, it's probably for a seriously good reason or it does exist somewhere and is performing poorly enough that you can't even find it after browsing 10 pages deep on a keyword search. What i learned from Ben Horrowitz, was that you need to find something that does work and has current market share (and market size), and make it 10x better. Making things 10x better and going after a defined market is the way to go. Forget the trending discussions of 1995-2005 that consisted of 'finding web concepts that no one had hacked up yet'.

Interesting theory, quite plausible in the web industry because everything moves so fast, as well as almost no barriers to competitive entry.

Luck is so much a factor in timing.