Aren't you just seeing your failed business without actually having to fail? You have some idea to change the world, someone copies it, they failed miserably; how do you lose there?

There are so many things that were "before their time" and failed, like garbage-collected programming languages. C beat Lisp, because GC was too slow. Then Java beat C, because manual memory management was too dangerous. Being too early is almost scarier than being too late.