I think it's also important to be precise about what "it" is.

Most MP3 players at the time had around an hour's worth of storage. The Creative NOMAD was 64 MB. That means those products were from a user experience perspective in the same category as Walkmen and Minidisc players. It was a writable music player that held about an album. It let you make your own mixtapes, but selecting media while at home was a fundamental part of the user experience.

The first iPod had 5-10 gigs of storage. You didn't have to decide what to listen to before you left the house. You just put everything on there and decided on the fly. This was a completely different experience.

Whether the little box played MP3s is essentially an implementation detail. It was the storage size that made the iPod an entirely different "it" from the devices that came before it, because the way you used it was so different.

For what it's worth: Creative Nomad with 64MB was just the first one. The one with 6GB of storage came out about a year before the iPad. Hence the iconic "No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame." by CmdrTaco. iPod hadn't won on the storage alone.

product market fit is tricky like that

I totally agree that having enough storage space for your full collection was an important differentiator.

But the thing is that the iPod wasn't the first to market for that either.

I remember having the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Jukebox and loving it before the iPod came along.

I don't think it was just the storage size that was the difference. It was the combination of a well designed simple UI together with excellent marketing that seemed to make the difference.

Two other factors that are often overlooked in the early success of the ipod:

400mb/s Firewire let you actually put a lot of files on it in a reasonable amount of time. The theoretical 11mb/s of USB 1.1 was painfully slow in comparison.

The ipod was _tiny_ compared to the other hard drive based mp3 players of the time.

I also remember iTunes (despite it's fall from grace later on) to be miles ahead of any syncing app. The difference in just plugging your iPod in and choosing which music to sync vs. erasing/reformatting/error-handling transfers to your mp3 was lightyears. That was part of what did it for me.

Also, on the iPod you could browse your music in an organized fashion (e.g. by artist), whereas with other mp3 players it was just a long list of tracks.

I remember it was slow to load up at the beginning, but that since it held all my music, I wasn't constantly switching what music was on the device, only occasionally loading a small new set of files, so the slow transfer didn't make much difference to me. Perhaps others had a different case where the transfer speed mattered more.

I can't tell you any other mp3 player commercial from that era. They were all kind of relegated to bestbuy fliers. The iPod was advertising with the colored background and the white headphones. It was good clear advertising and it was playing during the superbowl.

There's always been better mp3 players but normies don't know about them.

"Your blanket truism has a counter-example! I shall provide a counter-truism to fill the void."

One counter example ? I can’t even think of a single example where the first to market eventually won.

Most people use Google, not ALIWEB. How often have you flown on a Burgess plane instead of a Boeing or Airbus ? I bet you’re reading this on a Dell, Mac, HP, or other current brand PC, and not on a Ferranti. There are countless counter examples.

First-to-invent isn't guaranteed to succeed (your criticism) but "first to get it right" (your counter-truism) is also not a truism. After all, what is "right" and what is the "first" "right" in [anything]? Certainly there's no permanent guarantee to being first, but neither is being first-improver.

Chances are more people remember the MPMan F10 than - similar product that was released later by a competitor, the MMan 1.

Even if the mostly remember the MPMan F10 mostly because the play button kept getting stuck.

Indeed, no rule like the "be the first" promulgated here can be universalized across all situations. It does encourage urgency which makes it a useful heuristic and not much else.

I don't remember the ipod being successful until the second generation, with the ipod mini. So i would say you need to get something out that you can improve upon quickly, and make it the thing it needs to be.

Facebook and Google anyone ? :-)

Wht about the Creative NOMAD??