Comment by wewewedxfgdf
2 days ago
There's always a trail of competitors who almost got the magic formula right, but for some feature or luck or timing or money or something.
The giant win comes from many stars aligning. Luck is a factor - it's not everything but it plays a role - luck is the description of when everything fell into place at just the right time on top of hard work and cleverness and preparedness.
Google Search <-- AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo
Facebook <-- MySpace, Friendster
iPod <-- MP3 players (Rio, Creative)
iPhone <-- BlackBerry, Palm, Windows Mobile
Minecraft <-- Infiniminer
Amazon Web Services <-- traditional hosting
Windows (<-- Mac OS (1984), Xerox PARC
Android <-- Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm
YouTube <-- Vimeo, DailyMotion
Zoom <-- WebEx, Skype, GoToMeeting
Before iPods and iPhones, people thought that those spaces were "solved" and there was no room for "innovation"
mp3 players were commodity items, you could buy one for a couple of dollars, fill it up with your favourite music format (stolen) and off you went.
Phones too - Crackberry was the epitome of sophistication, and technological excellence.
Jobs/Apple didn't create anything "new" in those spheres, instead he added desireability, fancy UX that caught peoples' attentions