
First-To-Market Products That Lost - talison
http://www.businessinsider.com/10-first-to-market-companies-that-lost-out-to-latecomers-2009-11
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mlinsey
That rumored-for-years, never-confirmed-to-exist Apple tablet is just such a
colossus that people are already predicting that the Kindle will be the next
Betamax!

Other than that bold prediction at the end, a solid article. The succinct
takeaway lesson from each product was a nice touch.

~~~
netcan
I agree that the Apple tablet thing is funny.

But.. The Kindle prediction is I think more about convergence then any
specific Kindle killer. Will the average train passenger in 2015 own a Dell, a
Chromebook, an ?? tablet, an iphone _and_ a Kindle?

All of those four seem like they would be higher on an average person's
shopping list. All four can be used to to Kindle like things. All four are
getting better at doing Kindle like things. All four have the potential to
introduce killer features that Kindle probably can't match. If someone already
has 3 of the above, will they still get a Kindle?

What I think this type of thinking fails to consider is price. Kindle's might
reach a point of 'perfection' pretty soon. IE, new models don't make old
models obsolete, maybe. Kindle doesn't need more hard disk, memory, processing
power. It's job stay the same. This means that Moore's Law and it's cousins
can work on bringing down the price rather then improving the product. If the
Kindle was $69, and marginally nicer to read some things on, regular people
might still get one.

~~~
mlinsey
We can cut down even further from your list. Why carry around a cell phone
when your laptop already has a 3G wireless card? When you want to make a phone
call, you can just open up your laptop and fire up Skype!

If that sounds like a really cumbersome and painful user experience for many
situations in which you currently use your cell phone, people who read really
really religiously feel the same way about using a laptop or smartphone
instead of a Kindle (or printed media).

The Kindle is and will continue to be a more niche product than laptops or
phones. Not many people are serious readers. But for those who are, the user
experience on a laptop, netbook, or smartphone can't compare, mostly because
of form factor an eyestrain.

That's why I think only a tablet represents a serious threat to disrupt
Kindle. Whether it's the mythical Apple tablet or the CrunchPad (RIP) or some
other device that is actually built, if they manage to make a device that
performs well in brightly-lit conditions, they can probably replace Kindle.

I suspect that in the next decade the average consumer will have three
devices: One in a laptop form factor (with most having cheap netbooks running
Chrome or another thin-client OS, and some power users having more traditional
laptops), a phone, and a tablet or kindle-type device. The tablet or Kindle is
ideal for reading and consuming media, the phone perfect for making calls, and
the physical keyboard of the laptop necessary to get real work done.

Perhaps you could see some combinations, like a tablet that attaches to or
connects wirelessly to a keyboard which eliminates the need for the laptop, or
the phone just becoming a wireless headset interfacing with one of the other
devices (maybe my opening question wasn't so implausible after all!). Frankly
those combinations all sound pretty cumbersome and inelegant, so as long as
all three devices are cheap and compact, having all three won't be a big deal.

------
teilo
Quibbles:

First off, I wouldn't exactly say that Netscape lost, given that it is the
grandfather of Firefox. Yet, of course, Firefox is still in 2nd place...

Atari - Come on, guys. Atari ruled that genera throughout the entire first
wave of game consoles. When Atari died, so did the entire game console market,
not to be revived until the NES.

Everquest - Totally not true. They ruled the genera, again, for a long long
time.

Palm - Same thing. When they were hot, they were hot, and it took a long time
for Windows Mobile to unseat them.

Technology goes through seasons. In that regard, NO first-to-market
technologies ever "wins" forever.

~~~
netcan
Palm ruled while the market was a marginal market with huge future potential.
Now that handhelds are an everybody product & a huge market, palm is marginal.

------
iheartmemcache
For those of you who are like me and that type of format (a product a page?
Ugh), the ten products are:

Friendster

Palm

Netscape

Webcrawler & friends

Tivo

Saehan and Rio [mp3 players]

Betamax

Atari

Everquest

Kindle

~~~
known
Wordsworth.com, which started two years before Amazon
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000044.html>

