The Wright Brothers were up against all sorts of commercial and even military competition. Everyone was throwing huge amounts of money and resources at the prob

The Wright Brothers were up against all sorts of commercial and even military competition. Everyone was throwing huge amounts of money and resources at the problem. The Wrights were perceived as amateur-hour kooks playing with toys in a field. The military was downright rude when describing how their success was a forgone conclusion and that the Wrights weren't worth paying attention to. The other point is that while orgs like Amazon, eBay, PayPal and Craigslist ran with their first mover advantage, lots of other first-movers totally dropped the ball. See Friendster/Facebook for my favourite example. LiveJournal/WordPress/Tumblr is another set of hard lessons.