Being first is often not a sustainable competitive advantage and we have a good case study in looking at the recent past with 3G and 4G. Apple makes all the profit in smartphones and all the incumbents like Nokia, RIM, Ericsson are gone.
That's why you need to keep innovating if you want to keep making money. Turns out that doing a thing once isn't sufficient to profit off it for eternity.
But Apple has rarely been the first to innovate. They were not first in the personal computer, the laptop, the MP3 player, the smartphone, or the smartwatch. Most of the true innovators there are dead.
