I worked at IBM TJ Watson research at the time. It's hard to "steal" from IBM, because at the time I was there, IBM's #1 problem was getting its research into t

I worked at IBM TJ Watson research at the time. It's hard to "steal" from IBM, because at the time I was there, IBM's #1 problem was getting its research into the world. In 1996, I worked in a group on digital cash payment schemes, digital checking, years before PayPal, they had a trusted enclave (CITADEL PCMCIA card), we had a MIME plugin for Mosaic and Unix email that would do peer to peer digital money transfers, and when it came time to ask "when are we going to try to productize this", the answer came back "we talked with banks and will be ready to do a pilot project in 5 years" This is much like Steve Jobs "stealing" GUI, Smalltalk, and Ethernet from PARC and claiming there was no innovation. At that stage, shipping something consumers can use is innovation. If you were a techie/engineer in 1998, as opposed to a general consumer (of which there were very few), Google results WERE better than AltaVista and competitors. The early adopters and pioneers switched because like with Chrome v1, a lot of the value proposition was obvious. The bigger question perhaps is why didn't their competitors react quickly to prevent their rise, and I think the answer to that is in general, once a company makes a large splash, and gets the public attention, it's hard for others to overcome the free value from being the thought leader. This is true of Apple and true of Tesla in cars. Tesla makes the best EV right now. It's sexy, it's fast, and Elon Musk commands the world's attention. One day, other brands will catch up, they'll be Tesla competitors just as good, but no one will care, and Tesla -- if Musk doesn't fsck it up -- will continue to have a halo effect, a reality distortion field.