The first-to-market myth

Three paragraphs are several orders of magnitude too few for a serious treatment of the economics of these things. Italian restaurants have vastly different economics than, say, search engines or auction sites or bug trackers, or, for that matter, furniture makers.<p>It depends on the market you're in, its reach (Italian restaurants do not compete with other restaurants 1000's of kilometers away; craigslist does), network externalities and their strength in the market (they were right to say bug trackers don't have really strong network effects), switching costs and so on and so forth.

Is this really a myth? Being the first means confronting different challenges than being niche or disrupting an existing market - like creating and educating the market. The most important point in this discussion is to be aware of the impact of being the first (if it is really true) and developing the appropriate marketing strategy.

Doesn't everyone know this already anyway? Windows wasn't the first operating system. Firefox wasn't the first browser, neither was Internet Explorer. Google wasn't the first search engine. Apple didn't make the first MP3 player or smart phone. Facebook wasn't the first social networking site. Wikipedia wasn't the first online encyclopedia.<p>If you think you need to be first-to-market, then you know what you haven't isn't that great and you're just banking on novelty. "Build a better mousetrap" blah blah blah.