Innovation alone cannot guarantee Google & Apple its Financial Success

Be first to come up with innovative products and service alone cannot automatically guarantee long term financial success for a company, including Google or Apple. Yes, it definitely helps to be first-one to enter in non-competitive space and capture the major market share but a quick study of successful companies that dominated market for decades are also the first-best to commercialize the given opportunity. There is nothing more suicidal than letting your competitors know about your promising products and then again miserably failing to capitalize its benefits. Any lousy job in expansion or poor designing or pathetic customer experience for example is clear invitation for others to enter with improved offerings.

Poor implementation of wonderful offering publicly exposes your cards to other businesses that too compete in similar space – it given them better chance to launch their improved products after learning from your mistakes. So be the first-one and also be the first-best to jump into the market with all basics correct. Apple was not the first to come up with MP3 player but definitely was first-best to launch it and so is Amazon was not the first to sell online books.

Innovations that are technologically driven loses it differentiation as soon as the first products reaches market – either it gets copied or improved or even opens up war for pricing differentiation instead of technological differentiation. Be rest assured that there will be companies to deliver similar ore even better products with lesser cost after learning from your competencies.

Instead of beaten up by competitor’s edge be first to understand the changing customer behavior, be first to innovate to meet customer’s newer expectations and be first-best to risk full-fledged launch hence not making it easy for others to replace your value proposition.