I strongly disagree especially in the case of social networks. First movers in such spaces have incredible advantages and one of them is a lock-in effect. Countless follow-up social sites have come and gone that either had feature parity or better offerings than Facebook, but failed to get a foothold because of the fact that everyone already had Facebook. Why switch when everyone can already talk and plan?

SV really isn't as much of a meritocracy as people like to pretend, as so many times just being first to the party and locking people in is enough to keep them there. I'm sure tons of businesses on exchange would love to ditch and move to Google Apps for Business, but the change is just too much of a hassle, even if the features are exactly as desired. Same for Google businesses looking at the MS office world with starry eyes.

The merit often has less to do with a product's success and continued success as much as how efficient they are at locking people in. Going back to Facebook, it's not like there's a way to migrate or exfiltrate your data in any meaningful way to another system.

This is an exaggerated comparison, but the mafia adds value much in the same way, in that often you don't have a choice in the matter. This isn't to say people are forced to use Facebook, but much like a mafia town, it's hard to do business otherwise.