E. The Firstmover often Survives the Copycon Problems
Whenever there have been a new technology, it attracted investment from those with reserved money. Men with money aligned with men with brains to create something that could serve a large population so that they can both get rich. The Silicon Valley rally as we know it today was fuelled by the Rockefeller Family, who created the first venture fund by investing their family wealth acquired in the last century through monopolized oil business into Intel’s chip manufacturing business. Venture capital grew, and Intel grew.
Up to 2006, Nokia was virtually a market leader in Mobile technology with above 90% market share. However, as the Android ecosystem started getting matured, within 2008 Nokia was almost a closed company, nowhere to be seen in the market as more mobile manufacturing companies came into the picture. The moment technology starts getting popular, many others join the bandwagon to rip the commercial benefits without having to go through the rigor of development, testing, innovation, and improvement from the core.
These are the copy con who over the ages see others become commercially successful, envision a better success, forgets the underneath culture of rigor, and wanted nothing but to benefit from technological maturity. GE was the first to develop the first Color television, but today it is hardly having any market presence in Television technology. However, many successful Television manufacturing companies like Onida and Videocon closed down, but GE still exists today as a company.
In the same way, Car technologies have gone through significant transitions from their inception. From faster cars to safer cars to most fuel-efficient cars, to now electric cars and driverless cars. There have been several companies that joined the car manufacturing segment over the years like Ferrari, Toyota, Maruti, GE, Suzuki, Honda, Hyundai, and so on. However, the Benz and Ford companies still survive even after 100 years, all due to their core culture of innovation, perseverance, and technological advancement through ecosystem maturity. From time to time, such companies face an existential crisis. However, more often or not such companies survive.
In the chip segment, today Nvidia is a market leader in GPUs, Snapdragon is the leader in the mobile processor, Arduino is the technology market leader in IoT, and Intel is a struggling company, trying to find its foothold in the modern chip market. However, it still survives and innovates new chips, and technologies, hanging onto the market.
Even though Tesla has taken the electric car segment to a whole new dimension, the traditional car makers are catching-up faster and are hanging onto the competition.
We all know that Boeing is still going stronger today in Airplane manufacturing, even though there are other players like Airbus.
Google was the first ever dedicated Internet search company. Yahoo, America Online, etc existed before it, but Google’s key principle was solving information retrieval. After 25 years of its existence, there are several other search engines like Bing, Baidu, and now ChatGPT. However, due to constant innovation, the culture of innovation, and passion for the problem of information, Google still manages to maintain its foothold in the information retrieval problem.
