Does the first mover ever win, absent a government sanctioned monopoly?
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".
Actually your definition of a first mover isn't useful, as very few companies would fit it.
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.