If there’s one thing in common about the world’s most valuable technology companies, it’s that none of them invented the category of products they’ve come to determine. The same can be said of Microsoft in terms of operating systems, Apple in smartphones, Facebook in social media, Amazon in e-commerce, or Google in a search. To be number one, you don’t have to be first, you just need to choose the right path.
You’ll often hear people say, “trust your instincts”, or “go with your gut feeling”, and while it’s easy to say it’s often much harder to follow. But, that’s exactly what the founders of these very successful companies did, and look where they all are now – they’re literally some of the richest people in the world. In 2007, John Dvorak stated something that many were thinking but didn’t want to say, and that was that “Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone,” as “there is no likelihood” it would be successful. He also said the iPad would have little impact on the market. How wrong was he?! A lot of people also thought that Apple was nuts when it opened its first retail store back in 2001. However, today they are the most lucrative retail space in the whole of the US.
In 1998, two promising Stanford graduate students pitched their search engine idea to every internet company and investor that they could only to be told over and over again that there was no place in the world for a stand-alone Internet search company. However, students Larry Page and Sergey Brin finally found success when one man decided to ‘give it a go’ and invested $100,000 in them. That man was Andy Bechtolsheim and that was the day Google was born. But at first, it didn’t do as well as expected and in 1999 had less than 8% of the market share. However, things soon turned around and in 2000 the company launched AdWords and together they became one of the most powerful and influential company’s on the planet.
A similar story exists for that of Microsoft too. In 1980, Bill Gates was approached by some IBM suits enquiring about an operating system that could be made for a personal computer. At first, he pointed them in someone else’s direction, but when that failed, he gave in and used a modified version on QDOS in which to do it. Gates then decided to license DOS to IBM to make money continuously opposed to just a quick buck. DOS then became Windows and Gates soon became the richest man in the world.
While not every business has had the same successes as these ones, it does go to show that perseverance is the key. And, like mentioned before, it’s not all about being first, it’s about being right, and sometimes that means going with your gut instinct even if everyone else is against it.
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