Hi Armp*,
I don't disagree with your post. Incumbents can be savage in preventing products from accessing "their" marketplace. That's more-or-less what I have been arguing in the trusted mobile market. The vendors and carriers are just not going to let anyone get a foothold if they can help it.
I think there must also be a compelling product for an innovator to have a chance to displace incumbents. So someone has to have an idea. They have to build it.
In parallel, you are unlikely to build anything useful unless it is made with customer feedback. In my experience, a useful product usually has much of its nuance designed in from the demand side.
So it's a conversation.
I simplify because this is the realm of genius theory, in which we've been told the supply-side formula for success in a mythical environment of the total collapse of opposition from incumbents: secret sauce + standards + nice packaging = global domination. No mention of customer requirements. They are one half of every transaction.
And of course, when you have a thousand possible customers, you have all sorts of wants in play. It isn't the kind of question you can turn into a supply-side formula.
But it is also true that an incumbent can get away with gross imperfection if he controls the market via distribution etc.
