Well, there's two different kinds of timing. One of them, which the OP was about, is about investing. “Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others

Well, there's two different kinds of timing. One of them, which the OP was about, is about investing. “Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful" as Warren Buffet said. It's the contrarian timing - it's investing when nobody else wants to (because everyone thinks that the tech bubble burst and tech is dangerous and/or tech has been captured by a few big players in the 2004 case). Then there's the timing of a specific product, which requires hardware, software, etc, to be just so. My favorite example there is video streaming (which YouTube came to dominate). Google Video was what, 6 months later? And there were how many before that were sunk because of the tangle of codecs and other things required to view video over the internet before there was enough flash penetration? (Or consider Apple Newton vs. Apple iPhone).