None of that matters if you're bankrupt because your competitor shipped first (or promised to ship first) and captured the market. In the real world businesses often get boxed into making short-term decisions that hurt their long-term prospects due to lack of time and capital.
Not so fast. The first mover advantage is often severely overestimated. There are many examples of companies which failed despite being the first to deliver. Apple was not the first company to invent a smartphone. Facebook was not the first company to create a social-network portal. Google was not the first company to create a search engine.
A competitor shipping crap first is not a big threat, unless you compete in making crap.
Friendster and MySpace are both great examples of this. Both were the number one social media network at some point, and both were heavily burdened (if not killed) by technical debt. In the case of Friendster, the poor scalability engineering often made the site nearly unusable, and at MySpace, an enormous engineering team struggled to release new features while Facebook rapidly launched innovation after innovation.
