I remember an anecdote I'd heard a while ago; long before Starbucks was ubiquitous, and before coffee culture was what it is in North America, a cafe owner heard that Starbucks was going to be moving in down the street. He was worried, because he thought Starbucks was going to take all his business, so he called someone he knew who also ran a cafe, who'd had a Starbucks open in his town, to ask what he should do.

The friend told him this was the best thing that could have happened to his cafe, for a simple reason: Starbucks, and all the media surrounding their launch, will tell potential customers what the whole deal is with cafes and coffee culture, and people will flock to them in droves, and Starbucks will be insanely busy. A lot of those potential customers, and a lot of customers who really get into the coffee culture Starbucks brings, will come to the smaller cafes for more personal service, more handcrafted drinks, and a better atmosphere.

I heard the story in the context of Apple adding a feature to iOS years back, I forget which one. The point of the story is that Starbucks, or Apple in our case, is going to make a feature with mass-market appeal to a broad range of people. Customers who've never thought about it before will try it and see the benefit; customers who like it, but don't necessarily like Apple's offering, will go further afield to find better offerings from third-party developers.

Typically, the companies that tend to get completely Sherlocked are the ones who make a simple product with potentially mass appeal, and don't go beyond that, or who go beyond it with features that aren't practical or useful to most people.

Take Growl for example; a great notification framework that everyone used. Suddenly Apple adds support for native notifications, and push notifications, and Growl is thrown by the wayside, because all it did was offer notifications. No deferment, no forwarding to other devices (e.g. your iPhone). The only features it had were the obvious features that you would imagine for a notification service.

I think John Gruber said it best[1]: "when a utility is designed to compensate for a hole in Mac OS X, the developer should not expect the hole to remain unfilled by Apple forever".

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2003/10/commandtab