- AOL Compuserve was around first, but who acquired 20 million customers?
- PayPal Plenty of earlier attempts at making online money transfers, but can you name any of them?

One of the frequent responses to my questioning of first-to-market is the time value of money. Of course the corrollary to the time value of money should be the time value of recovery–how much more does it cost you to recover from premature market release than it would have cost you to just do it right the first time? So fixing a design flaw when customers are paying for your product is way way way more costly than fixing the design flaw or more fully developnig the design in the first place, before a commercial release.

I’m certainly not saying first-to-market is wrong–I’m just saying it isn’t always right. Now, how do we develop a theory to help determine when it is or isn’t the right strategy to follow?

Also, anytime you talk about first-to-market you should consider time-to-market, i.e. the time value of money says that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. Sony keeps stupidly coming out with proprietary technology (a friend of mine there confirms it is a mentality) but the money they make can be pumped into being first to market with the next new gadget. And with gadgets, newer is better (to gadgetheads).

From niblettes comes this excellent short deliberation on whether first to market is more advantageous than waiting for something well designed. Here is his post in full, The oft parroted common wisdom is that to succeed you need to get……

Dyson - definitely design, *but* not design alone, it was design coupled with an entirely new engineering solution to the suction problem faced by existing bag based vacuums. He solved a problem. The design, to be honest, in this case, was the casing for the essential problem solution paradigm he invented. But on the side of your iNPD plays - his pricing, his promotion, his product were all “rule breakers” too. It was a clean sweep so to speak, to indulge myself.

VHS vs Betamax - Here, at least from what little strategic analysis we did in class, the rationale given for vhs success vs. beta’s decline was the proprietariness of the hardware solution. While VHS tech was spread out amongst far more mfrs, sony held on tightly to the beta, and only beta tapes would work on it. plus price. one of the earliest examples of the success of open source and viral spread of something that was universally exchangeable, so to speak.

I loved the case study on product design ref Blink and del.icio.us, especially as an ardent delicious fan I can see what it’s about. thanks, I intend to steal it for this shameless link http://www.designdirectory.com/blog