Microsoft Word came after WordPerfect. Chrome came after Netscape Communicator. Python came after Perl. Nintendo came after Atari.
I feel like first movers advantage is a myth.
I don't think there's any question that there is an advantage to being a first mover. What I think is a mistake is thinking that it's an absolute advantage, and/or not recognizing that it's also true that there are advantages to to not being the first mover. I mean, there's a reason why the "fast follower strategy"[1] exists as well.
I think in reality though, all of this is over-simplifying things. There are a LOT of variables in the equation for "does this product succeed or not" where "being first to market" is just one of those variables.
Similarly with Tesla
So their point stands. They have to be much better. And all of these were.
It took more than a decade. They basically built out the features and waited until their competitors made some strategic mistake, of which they made several in that decade.
It was pretty much the same with Netscape and MSIE. That monopoly misuse probably helped, but Netscape also seemed bent on killing itself. Despite the mismanagement, it still took almost five years.
Perl was more popular than Python for more than a decade. Having much of the early web developed on it didn't help in the long run. First mover advantage might be a thing, but it never wins in the long run. And in the long run, ten years is nothing.
20 years later I'm still programming in Python.
Microsoft Word was a loser, but then they changed out the operating system under the winners.
Word Perfect had the OS changed from under them but also had every warning that the change was coming and refused to move to sturdier ground.
It was pretty easy to write off Windows 3.1, and continue to be a solid solution on MS-DOS and with Netware, etc.
But Windows 95 had a lot of fanfare in advance that suggested it would have much better uptake. And Windows NT in parallel was developing a credible foundation, and it got the "new shell" as an option around the time of Win95. My recollection at the time was that the writing should've been on the wall, that Windows was going to be the Microsoft platform.
If WordPerfect was slow to move, that's a bad combination with, er, not as direct of access to the platform teams.
Maybe. No company lives forever, at some point all of these things will be unseated. But those first movers had pretty good runs, as far as technology companies go. Maybe they aren't still #1 but if you're #1 for a decade or more, that might be as much as any one company can "win" here.
Apple and specifically Jony Ive started the development of a handheld computer in the early 90s. Apple was definitely not a second comer to that market.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jony-ives-first-apple-design...
That's an odd way to define "not a second comer". The Apple Newton was a PDA, but it wasn't the first to hit the market.
Sure, it was in development before that, but that's true of every device that was released in that generation. And besides, "first mover advantage" doesn't refer to the first to begin research on a product; it refers to the first to release a product into the market.
All of those products that came after are better than the first movers. If Apple was worse than BB, do you think it would have won?
For example Amazon Kindle was not the first eReader. But its platform-ecosystem was years sooner than Barnes & Nobles Nook and Kindle won out.
Amazon itself is technically a "second mover" because there was an obscure online book shop before, but no one else from the established sales companies or Walmart could compete with them.
Tesla was not the first electric car. But it is arguably the first reaching a production of a million, so it is the first e-car from a "main" manufacturer?
In my life I've seen that happen a handful of times. When it does, it's usually due to (1) tragic management ineptitude over an extended period of time, or (2) fear of cannibalizing an existing profitable business (e.g.,: Kodak refusing to move from film to digital cameras, or the car industry being slow to re-invest away from ICE production.) I see no evidence (yet) that AI-enhanced search is going to threaten Google's core business of "displaying ads on relevant search results", so the main risk here is long-term management failure. Right now Google's management is doing everything it can to signal (to shareholders and partners) that they're going to throw every resource they have at the problem.
> better design, cheaper price, better range, better reliability
That doesn't mean the first mover advantage doesn't exist.
They are trapped by the decisions they made as first movers, while later incumbents have freedom to create improvements without worry about the installed base.
Apple is one company that never seemed to fall into that trap. They just tell the installed base “fuck you, buy the new thing” and somehow get away with it.
Apple comes in and innovates against something that existed but was user hostile.
It actually did happen to Apple over a long enough horizon, they cornered the paid digital music market by perfecting it, and upended it, and didn't innovate/upend again, and along came Spotify to upend it for them.
We're still in that phase phase of both Tesla and Bing AI.
Another case of the browser doing what the OS and Desktop environment should be doing. I like to point at tabs - DEs and GUI toolkits never really came up with a good way to handle multiple documents well.
Widgets would be a potential solution but they keep being tried and abandoned soon after in desktop OSes.
In Mac Os one can use spotlight with cmd + space with similar results.
Or sometimes I check a calculator I implemented myself (shameless plug: https://getcalculator.app/)
Once again, compared to it just being there in front of you and ready to go that's still work to do to get it there.
You can do it all as one big expression with parentheses and such but if you're doing a bunch of calculations on the go that could get repetitive, and one wrong Esc and your calculation goes away.
There's still a calculator widget for the MacOS notification center. It's accessed in any app through a trackpad gesture or by clicking on the date/time in the menu bar.
The fact that it seems to be similar enough to the iOS implementation of them gives me hope, but only barely.
You also need to know the feature exists (they had notifications before widgets, people might not know it was updated to support them), that there exists a calculator widget, and to add it before you need to use it. That's the same discoverabiloty problem, with the added wrinkle that functionality changed in Monterey.
For most of the past decade. I believe widgets were added to Notification center in 2014.
Dashboard was first, and then they were reimagined as iOS-style in Monterey.
I'll be their paying customer soon. It would be great if that meant I had privacy as well, but I kinda bleakly realize that that might be a bit of a pipe dream.
The goal posts also aren't "search" they're "AI enhanced search", let's not muddy the waters by moving them. Google may certainly be dominating in search, but they are clearly trying to sprint from miles behind in the latter.
Remember how much trouble Microsoft got into for having a basic monopoly on desktops with Windows, and trying to bundle Internet Explorer? Replace Windows with Standard Google, and Internet Explorer with AI-based Google Search. You'll cut Google off at the knees with that move. And even if they survive the ~4-5 years litigation, they'll be severely hampered, kind of like how Microsoft was with the mobile phone market.
Read the comment thread you just replied to and tell me how any of what you just said is relevant to me correcting the sentence "Bing isn't dominating anything haha."
- Google's entire search engine has had many layers of "AI" powering it for years.
- Bing hasn't even released this supposed AI search engine to the public.
Your other example was Tesla and the two examples couldn't be more different. Your statement would be like someone saying Tesla was "dominating" electric cars before they ever even sold a single Roadster and had just posted a demo video. It's just wrong. I can be first to market with a banana that glows in the dark, am I in the club now too?
They may dominate if this exact form of conversational answers proves popular and if launched more than a hacked together demo and only then is some strong claim they are doing anything interesting could be worthwhile.
Until then they are kind-of first-but-actually-not-really in a kind-of-theoretical-market, and not dominating it all or reaping any first-mover advantage given their opponents are ready to follow on immediately.
The market exists. Products have been announced. Some are clearly more popular than others. I don't know why you care so much that Google beats Bing, but it's plainly obvious both from people's and Google's own reactions that Bing is currently considered the winner in the space.
Will it last? Maybe. Maybe not. The very thread you are replying to is that first movers ultimately fail. But it's plainly clear Bing has captured the first mover advantage in the space, whether you like it or not.
It could very well be that even a small chance of this happening can cause Microsoft to go all in on making Bing more AI. Being very expensive is the point.
See also: Star Wars, Itanium.
I think they'll ultimately have to open up the charging to get federal funding, but it'll be interesting to see what happens when they do. It's definitely a massive advantage right now.
The Model Y was the top selling model in Europe in December 2022. EV or ICE. https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilwinton/2022/12/07/model-y--...
It will probably make a bigger impact in the US. And the switch to a standard interface is holding up billions in federal funding so Tesla will probably eventually take the hit.
And pretty much all of them have better QC and a vaster maintenance network than Tesla (and in the E.U the charging network all use the same type of connector, so you are not tied to the manufacturer of your car).
But still, whenever you talk electric car, people often talk first about Tesla and they have no problem selling them. This might mostly be true in the E.U though. Also the model 3 is still priced fairly well being in-between the higher-end of the market and the intermediate.
Also, you don't really need to beat Tesla if you just want to make (and sell) electric cars. Tesla doesn't fill every niche and is nowhere near enough in terms of volume to satisfy the EV demand.
(If you want to be a bigger electric car company than Tesla then you have to beat Tesla, yeah -- that's a tautology, not an interesting observation tho).