Comment by nonameiguess

Earlier than that, Facebook became ascendent because of quality. It was better than MySpace, the only real competitor at the time. The issue here is Facebook is not primarily a software product. It's a community, and the community was better than MySpace because it was restricted to pre-existing networks rather than taking any comer. I don't think Mark did that on purpose as a calculated decision. He just got lucky. When they eventually opened up and became just as shitty as MySpace had been, they were big enough to simply acquire better products that might have been competitors, and network effects locked them in for probably decades until their users die off and don't get replaced by younger people who never used Facebook.

I don't really see it as an example of what you're saying so much as an example of success as a product having to do with far more than explicit product features. You can see a similar dynamic in other natural monopoly markets. The NBA didn't necessarily do anything particularly right product wise, for instance. They just got the best players because basketball was historically more popular in the US than other countries, and the ABA made some stupid decisions that let the NBA win out in the US.

Hell, the US itself didn't do a whole lot "right" aside from not being in Europe when Europe decided to destroy itself, being better-positioned than other potential competitors like Canada, Mexico, and Australia simply because North America is best positioned to trade with both Europe and Asia and the US is more temperate than Canada or Mexico. But we sure like to tell ourselves stories about everything we did right.