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Comment by estefan | Hacker News Reader

> First mover advantage is rarely an advantage at all

Genuine question (not a snarky comment as it might sound), but can you link to any research that indicates it's 'rarely' and advantage?

I've been reading books recently that emphasise the importance of being the first to market with something innovative. Your brand then gets associated with the product/service ("hoover", "Uber", "google") even when referring to the general category.

Second-mover advantages do exist, but is there any research on whether it's more advantageous than being a first mover who iterates? I know it can happen, but in this case I'd rather be Uber with an established brand & mindshare rather than Google playing catch-up.

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Take any big market business started over 10 years ago, and look at the current major players. Then look at all the people that started before them. You will basically never find a company that started 1st, also be the market share leader 10 years out.

There are some exceptions, but once a 10 year period has passed, the biggest player is rarely the first player. Also, the markets don't usually become really profitable for a while.

Uber has not won yet, and I don't think they will be in 1st place in 5 years.

Google started at least a few years after many, many sites including yahoo.

Those books aren't really mentioning Google Search as an example, right? It didn't have first-mover advantage.

It kind of did, AFAIK it was the first functional search engine.

Everything else at the time was pretty terrible.

Yeah, no true Scotsman ends up losing first-mover advantage.

It's not no true scotsman though. Google search was very different to what came before it. The only similarity was the UI.

That's nonsense. The only two differentiators were the minimalistic UI (at a time when load speed of a web page was noticeable) and the better quality of the results. There were a bunch search engines already, all of them with a search box where you typed stuff and got a list of results.

> I've been reading books recently that emphasise the importance of being the first to market with something innovative

That worked well for the Newton, the Lisa, the Nomad, Amiga Inc, didn't it?

Contrast with Palm, Mac & Windows, iPods, and so on and so forth.

Perhaps the difference is being a first mover while the market is establishing itself, before it then gives way to another innovation cycle.

I suppose in that case, the key is innovation. So Google would be wise to innovate over the competition... but they might stand a chance due to their deep pockets. It hasn't worked out well for their attempts to get into several markets though.

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