AOL might have been first but then they just seem to have quit. They didn't keep up with the times. Their whole paradigm was terrible out of date. They were in the ISP market but extremely slow and it killed them.
Lotus 1-2-3 was before Excel but Lotus took a long time to release new versions while Office did not. You'll notice that MS isn't super quick with releases now, but they do churn out new versions with some regularity.
Business doesn't have a finish line so companies have to start and stay fast. This is why technical debt is a problem; sometimes you need technical debt to get something out the door fast, but it will slow down future releases so you need to get it under control.
There are many ways to get ahead. Bureaucracy sucks.
But just saying, "Speed man, speed... that's the good stuff..." It's only true when it's paired with customer demand, high quality, and all the other things users demand.
ICQ vs. AIM? I can't actually think of a single example of a product being first to market and that making them better than the challengers. Getting to market... no question, that's great. Blowing away what exists in the market... that's what gets you customers. So inherently being first isn't advantageous since you're opening the door to others taking your idea and improving on it.
I'll say again, build the best thing you know how to build... if you don't build it great, people will notice. Nobody wants a quick and dirty solution once they see the well-designed, delightful, secure, improved, etc. solution.
Facebook > MySpace
Instagram > Facebook
Reddit > Digg
Any modern software language... nobody is like, "Man, give me some ASP VB, that came out before Rails or Node... it must be better." We evolve. Speed, it may be a factor. But what you build has to survive past launch. Do your best to give it the legs it needs... and maintain it as vigorously as you can. ROI is in planning.
> All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win.
So, that's why we all still use AOL? And why Microsoft never had to worry since it built Office? Why PayPal squashed Venmo? The point is really that all else are never equal. Speed to market is A factor, but it's not the only factor, or even the most important factor today. Look at Box, vs. Dropbox, vs. Copy, vs... The market is big enough for multiple identical services. Users pick the one that works the best for them.
And I certainly agree asking questions is a GREAT way to start documenting all the stuff that has to go into a project. I'd add a bullet point, "Way more hours than I want for... explaining why setting up Vagrant is important... explaining why unit tests save time, for the 900th time... explaining why QA is needed..."
Things don't often get tracked that ought to be, but PLEASE do not send more meeting requests to your entire dev team asking them to justify to marketing or sales why we need the basic steps we ask for.
(This article hits a bit close to home today, as I'm literally in a meeting with 15 people where only 2 people are talking and I literally just had to defend QA marketing guy who clearly doesn't get it. And the topic... "How we can organize our team to be more efficient.")