Saturday, October 30, 2010

Technically, First = Failure

I saw an article the other day about MySpace, their redesign, and whether it was relevant, and how it originally got started by someone taking Friendster's idea and expanding it. It got me thinking.

You hear very little about Friendster these days, and very little positive today about MySpace. Replaced by Twitter and Facebook. What happened? Why couldn't they keep up?

It got me thinking about others:

Leaders who Lost:
Tandy Deskmate->GeoWorks->Windows
Tandy Deskmate was the first desktop I used, with "everything" - Word Processor, Calendar, Games, and online connection. GeoWorks came out around the time of Windows 1, and did it better. And OS/2 Did Windows better than windows!

Visi-Calc->Lotus->Excel
I still don't get this one.

WordPerfect->Word
Every professional used Wordperfect - until the GUI.

Palm Treo->Blackberry->iPhone/Android
Palm had the market in PDA's, and one of the first smartphones - the Treo. The company that "owned" the pda market, seems like that had everything they needed to take it all. BlackBerry took over smartphones until iPhone, and even after, until Android OS.

No conclusions, I'm not much of a writer or analyst of these things. Anybody got thoughts on why market leadership in technology is so hard to hold?

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