Highly debatable.
When we look back during the internet and mobile waves it is overwhelmingly the companies that came in after the hype cycle had died that have been enduring.
"Several studies have shown that pioneers have long-lived market share advantages and are likely to be market leaders in their product categories. However, that research has potential limitations: the reliance on a few established databases, the exclusion of nonsurvivors, and the use of single-informant self-reports for data collection. The authors of this study use an alternate method, historical analysis, to avoid these limitations. Approximately 500 brands in 50 product categories are analyzed. The results show that almost half of market pioneers fail and their mean market share is much lower than that found in other studies. Also, early market leaders have much greater long-term success and enter an average of 13 years after pioneers."
PDF available here:
https://people.duke.edu/~moorman/Marketing-Strategy-Seminar-...
> Founders and company builders will continue to build in AI—and they will be more likely to succeed, because they will benefit both from lower costs and from learnings accrued during this period of experimentation
This still lines up with the 2nd wave benefiting more. The first movers helped established the large scale AI hardware industry, got a bunch of smart kids trained on how to make AI, a bunch of people will fail and learn, etc and this experimentation stage sets the groundwork for OpenAI 2.0.
We could very well just in the Altavista vs Yahoo days of AI and an upstart takes over in 5yrs.
Microsoft Office: wasn't close to the first office editing suite
Google: Wasn't close to the first search engine
Facebook: Wasn't close to the first social media website
Apple: ~~First "smart phone"~~ but not the first personal computer. Comments reminded me that it wasn't the first smartphone
Netflix: Wasn't close to the first video rental service.
Amazon: Wasn't close to the first web store
None of the big five were first in their dominate categories. They were first to offer some gimmick (i.e., google was fast, netflix was by mail, no late fees), but not first categorically.
Though they certainly did benefit from learnings of those that came before them.
Was it the first smartphone? I would call phones like the Palm Treo and later BlackBerries smartphones. There were even apps, but everything was lot more locked down and a lot more expensive.
And just plain... bad. The entire experience didn't have that "feel" that Apple turned into reality. It's comparable to today's AI landscape—the technology is pretty neat, but using it is a complete slog.
Edit: There were also the limitations of that era that held devices back in general. WAP internet[1] was awful, but most mobile services were too slow for much else.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol
The entire device was a regular Linux machine.
It's not just you; at the time these products were available, _everyone_ called them smartphones. Emphatically, Apple did not bring the first smartphone to market, not even close. They were, however, the first to popularize it beyond the field of nerds into the general public.
>it became a huge sales success for Nokia ... It managed to outsell rivals such as LG Viewty and iPhone.
However the iPhone got better.
The 770 was released in Q4 '05.
They definitely fell within the smartphone category, but oddly the first few iterations lacked GSM radio.
"key differentiator" and not necessarily easy to pull off or pay for
Just to quibble with this - that was not even close to the reason Google got popular. It was because Google was much, much better at finding what you actually wanted. It was just a far better product.
You can debate why this is exactly, Joel Spolsky pointed out many years ago that it was because Google got that what matters to users most isn't "finding all pages related to X" but rather "ranking" those pages, a take I agree with.