Law 1 (law of leadership) from The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

The book says: being first in the market is better than having a better product than a competition. Examples: we all remember who first flew over Atlantic or who was the first man on the moon but almost no-one knows who was the second. Heineken was the first imported beer in USA and still is No. 1 imported beer. Same for Miller Lite, first domestic light beer. Being first doesn't matter if the idea/product is not good.

My comments: I think it's better to say that being first gives one extremely big advantage over competition but doesn't guarantee the success. It's rather obvious that it doesn't matter that you're first to market if no-one needs your product or if your product is very bad. There are many examples from computer industry that disapprove this rule (i.e. first spreadsheet isn't the dominant spreadsheet, first word processor isn't the dominant word processor) so there are (many) cases showing that n-th product can overtake early leaders. But it's very hard and usually requires the leader to make huge mistakes.

     

A different story

I saw two movies recently: "Minority Report" and "Bourne Identity". They have few things in common:

• they're good
• they're blockbusters
• they're based on a book ("Bourne Identity")/story ("Minority Report")
• they have little in common with the original stories

I've read "Bourne Identity" a long time ago and the movie shares only the basics of the plot (a trained-to-kill special agent, his amnesia and his newly met female companion) with the movie. Given that I'm a big fan of P. K. Dick (insane author of "Minority Report") after seeing a movie a went to bookstore to read his short story on which the movie was based and the story repeats: the similarity is rather superficial.

On one hand I find this disfigurement hard to swallow. On the other hand the voice of reason (in those rare moments when it bothers to visit me) tells me that the movies are probably better for it. You can't really make a good movie that would be literally based on anything that P. K. Dick wrote - there's a reason he remained respected but largely unknown SF writer.