yet 5 years later the guy who built "this new web-app" is still floundering trying to compete with the behemoths for attention, while the guy who did a +1 in a foreign market is #1 or #2 in his country, rolling around in millions and waiting to be acquired for a ton of money.
Nothing is stopping the guy who did +1 from doing the innovative thing after he makes his millions.
Could, yeah, lots of things could happen. My guess is the "first mover localization play" is, more often than not, a lower risk, lower payoff sort of thing. You're never going to be the next Google, but then again, you can see that the original service is working pretty well - you're not creating something that's never been done before, so you have an example to follow, and if you execute well and play your cards right, you have a decent (or at least better) shot at making money than the 'blue sky' sorts of projects.
I think it puts you at a disadvantage. It's generally far easier for the established, high-traffic, high PR, etc... player to add a new resource bundle with language de jour, than for you to rebuild their application and get the traction they already have.
Plus, if they came up with something new to begin with, they probably have smart folks coming up with ideas on what to add/enhance next.
I'm not saying it's a bad business move, or that doing something in order to make money is wrong, but copying someone else's effort just feels a lot closer to domain squatting than creating value (although yes, having a localized version of the web-app has some value) to me.
While I wasn't first to the market space with 10MinuteMail (actually I hadn't even looked if anyone else was doing it, as I was just doing it to teach myself Seam), 10MinuteMail definitely had a twist on the temporary e-mail thing (a good twist for some users/uses, bad for others). 20MinuteMail sprang up shortly after 10MintuteMail, and there a number of people who have or are trying to sell "10 Minute Mail Clone" scripts on various sites. So I've been on the receiving end of the pure cloning play. It feels kinda slimy to me. Plus 20mintutemail has less users since Aug '07 than I had before lunch today, so I'm really not sure it's a smart move for the cloners.
I think that cloning a website by localizing it for another country only really makes sense when the community around the website is a big part of its value. In this case the new community surronding the localized version is going to provide a significant advantage to the cloner.
For 10MinuteMail, there is not as much value added by localizing it so it's certainly not a good idea to clone it...
Nothing is stopping the guy who did +1 from doing the innovative thing after he makes his millions.