How To Win As Second Mover
blog.eladgil.com
blog.eladgil.com
This article (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/03/with-8-8-market-share...), though a bit outdated, show how insanely lopsided this market is: Apple has 8.8% of the market of worldwide mobile phones, yet makes 73% of the profit pool.
(An interesting note: Apple + Samsung combined make 99% of the profit pool)!
In general, I mean "second mover" more generically. I.e. what do you do if someone already has a strong or growing market position? How can you beat them?
The point is, for every company that is a first mover that we know of, there were usually lots of others started before it that failed. There are a number of academic papers on the subject, one was called something like "First mover disadvantage".
eBay was the first online second hand marketplace of any reach AFAIK.
I think defining "first mover" becomes a semantic argument at some point. I think Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Craigs List were in situations where there were no strong incumbents and were the first to grow to any scale and that is the key point.
The question this post tried to address is "What if there is an incumbent or strongly growing competitor? What can you do?"
I definitely agree that the saying "pioneers are often the ones with arrows sticking out of their backs" so am by no means arguing being first is the same thing as winning.
Actually your definition of a first mover isn't useful, as very few companies would fit it.
Android is a second mover maybe if compared to Windows Mobile or other systems licensed to manufacturers.