You're absolutely right — first-mover advantage is often overrated, especially in tech. C++ is a perfect example: it was messy, slow to adopt, and competitors like Java seemed poised to dominate. Yet C++ became foundational infrastructure because it solved the right problem (performance + abstraction) at the right time, and iterative improvement beat early polish.
Research shows early followers actually capture 28% market share with only 8% failure rates, while first movers burn through capital validating the market. Speed matters less than timing + execution. The real winners often learn from pioneers' mistakes, enter when infrastructure matures, and scale when adoption curves steepen.
Same pattern everywhere: Google wasn't the first search engine, Facebook wasn't the first social network, iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. Being early means you're the crash test dummy.