Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

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    There are many businesses where shipping 20% later leads to ceding first
    mover advantage and losing the game.

Are there? Can you name some examples? Because when I think of technology, first-mover advantage counts for very little. The first successful web browser wasn't NCSA Mosaic. It was Netscape. The first successful portable music player wasn't the Nomad, it was the iPod. The Macintosh long predated Windows, but Windows has by far the larger market share. Same with iOS and Android. Google was far from the first search engine. Facebook was far from the first social network. Amazon didn't invent e-commerce. In automobiles, Ford was first to mass production, but it was overtaken by General Motors by the 1930s, and they both were in serious trouble when the Japanese auto manufacturers, which didn't even really get going until after World War 2, arrived.

So in which business exactly does shipping 20% later lead to "losing the game"? If anything, the real risk is in shipping a half-baked product too soon.

I used to think this.

But as a member of a small-ish company, I remember there was this time the sales VP insisted that we MUST have this product out by a certain tradeshow. Engineering worked hard and delivered, and although the thing had warts, it gave our company an advantage: the current market leader showed up at the next tradeshow a couple months later (e.g. "20%") with a similar product and price point, but our lead in time meant that we were able to exist as a strong competitor. This single product launch and subsequent sequels lifted our company for quite a long time.

So now when the sales guys insist we might need something by a certain date, I carefully evaluate rather than dismiss out of hand - I've learned to trust their role as well.

AdSense, Amazon, Apple II / iPod / iPhone / iWatch, CNN, JavaScript, Netscape, Netflix, PayPal, Roku

The critical window isn't when something is first possible (e.g. when the first product appears), but when the combination of technical abilities, component price points, and market characteristics intersect to permit success.

To use a physical example, the iPod and iPhone were great products, but they were hits because they launched with the features they did, at a specific point in time, at a specific price point.

We know that potential for success infection point existed then, because they did build a working device and achieved success.

Consequently, if they had not completed those devices when they did (say, +20% time), another device could have achieved their success.

Maybe nobody on the planet existed other than Apple who could do it... but the possibility was provably there.

Or in simpler form: Netflix was far from the first streaming video service. They were the one who launched with the right features at the right time.

Nobody cares if you catch a small wave perfectly. What matters is catching the best wave of the day, in the brief window you have.

The reason all those examples you cite became as successful as they did is because they spent that extra 20% to get it right. They didn't just ship some MVP out the door. They spent a huge amount of time and energy to get the product as close to perfect as they could before shipping. Steve Jobs, famously, became concerned about the aesthetics of the traces of the circuit board on the original Macintosh [1], spending $5000 (16,330 in 2023 dollars) and a couple of weeks, to have a circuit board created with better aesthetics. Then they threw that board away because, it turned out that aesthetic traces don't actually correspond to good signal propagation.

That's the reason that Apple, especially, has been so successful. It's not because they launched at some perfect time window. It's because they launched damn good products. If the iPhone had launched in 2008, or even 2009, it would have been just as successful. We just would have had another two years of mediocre Windows Mobile/Symbian OS/Blackberry devices.

[1]: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

I think that's an oversimplification. The original Mac was a terrible computer. It was slow, it had too little memory, it overheated, it wasn't expandable, the keyboard was deliberately crippled by removing the arrow keys, it had a single button mouse, and it required almost endless floppy swapping.

The graphic UI and the case design were distinctive. But what really sold it was an incredibly sophisticated ad campaign that carpet bombed key media outlets with super-expensive exposure.

The problem with Symbian/Blackberry/Palm wasn't just mediocre technology, but a lack of dazzle. The products were functional but mediocre. But they were also marketed in mediocre geeky/corporate ways that just weren't that interesting to most consumers.

The original iPhone was barely more functional. But again, exterior aesthetics and a huge marketing and PR campaign forced open a consumer market for a product that was - like the original Mac - barely finished.

The problem Google has is that its products and its branding are heading rapidly towards mediocrity. It reminds me of DEC - an engineering giant in the 70s and 80s, which forgot how to read the market and innovate in the 90s, and crashed far more quickly than anyone would have predicted.

> Because when I think of technology, first-mover advantage counts for very little.

This. The ideal thing is to be second, or even third, not first. "The pioneers get all the arrows."

> Facebook was far from the first social network.

Oh? By this rule, then Facebook must have been quickly replaced by one of the many competitors who launched later, yes?

Quite likely, if the playing-field was level, or at least they'd have lost huge market-share.

Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 precisely because they were a direct threat. The FTC could have blocked that; or more recently, prevented tighter integration with FB+WA.

Currently they're using lobbyists to try to push TikTok (and WeChat) out of the US market.

Yahoo imploded because it had to pander to the short-term whims of the stock market; Zuckerberg references this frequently when talking about how FB (i.e. he) maintains control of its stock and autonomy.

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