My feeling is that this rule is often true, but also mostly useless. Because of why it's true: post-facto rationalization. Every product ever made is the first to do something - though sometimes we are forced to make up new words to describe just what that something is - and if that product is a wild success it will turn out that that something was the important thing to be first in.

I'm fairly sure that the first iPhone camera shipped out of the box with the ability to snap a photo and then email it to a list of your friends. I'm sure that there was a way to post an iPhone photo to Facebook. But in the next five years when two dozen Instagram clones get founded, flail, and die, we will be told that they failed because Instagram was the "first" to "really" get mobile photo sharing. Where "really get" is defined circularly: We know that Instagram was the first to have it, because no earlier company managed to become Instagram.

Similarly: The IBM PC was not among the first PCs to hit the market, the iPhone was not the first smartphone with a touch screen, Facebook was not the first social network, Dropbox was not the first way to sync files between computers, Amazon was neither the first online retailer nor the first online retailer of books:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000044.html

More classic examples: Singer didn't build the first sewing machine, neither Swan nor Edison built the first electric light bulb, Henry Ford was far from the first automobile manufacturer (but he was "first" in several other things, which are now known to have been vitally important, because they formed the basis of… the very successful Ford Motor Company!)

One could probably rephrase the rule to make it more useful. (Perhaps a variation on the classic "nobody ever got fired for buying the industry standard"?) But it's surprisingly hard. The subject resists glib generalization. I'd just pay more attention to the other rules. ;)

That's kind of what I was wondering. That being 'first' is largely irrelevant since, if you make it, you were 'first' to get it 'right' (terms which are rationalised after the event). Hence, I'd consider them of limited use outside of hypothesis testing.

Thanks for an excellent post.

Like he said. If you are going to be second, you have to bring something really great to the table, something that itself has value, and replaces the value of the thing you are leaving. To use an example: Sean Parker said Facebook should never have won, considering MySpace's network effect at its height. Facebook was great: it had its own value, but it still had to replace MySpace's massive network effect. Luckily, due to MySpace's lack of innovation at that time, its own value plummeted, making it easier for Facebook to rise up above it.

That's what I would say. Being first is good, because you can capture the market, hence making it difficult for users to switch.

"There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat."