I have a tremendous degree of regard for mcuban, and I think his advice has merit. But I wouldn't say either "trumps" the other. These pithy sayings are handy, but there's a lot of nuance to both of them (IMO) and the devil is in the details.
Should Google have decided not to pursue search because of Altavista, Dogpile, Magellan, Northern Light, Yahoo, and DMOZ? Should Facebook have eschewed social networking because of Friendster, Myspace, Livejournal, etc?
Sometime just being better than the other guys really is enough.
But I would counter with...Google wasn't a search company, but an advertising platform. And that's where is looked where others were not.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/overture-sues-google-over-search-p...
In terms of sales, GoDaddy is six times the size of the Dallas Mavericks business, and ~20 times the size Broadcast.com was before the dotcom bust.
But my sense is Cuban could do it again. Parsons benefitted from timing and is likely more of a one trick pony.
Yes, a great and lucrative trick. But still one trick :)
"In 1984, he founded Parsons Technology in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and began selling MoneyCounts, a home accounting program. In late 1987, Parsons was able to quit his job and focus completely on selling and overseeing growth of MoneyCounts. Eventually, Parsons Technology grew to be a 1,000-employee, privately held company. On September 27, 1994, Parsons completed the sale of Parsons Technology to Intuit, Inc. for $64 million."
I think that trumps Parsons. That said, looking at ideas that "didn't work" can be a solid approach. That is, sometimes (for example) the idea was solid but the team failed. The market also changes and some ideas can be ahead of their time (and poorly executed).