As the tech. world awaits Apple's announcement of an iTunes cellphone, Apple's strapline is:

"1,000 songs in your pocket changed everything," reads the invitation. "Here we go again."

In 1999 I bought a hard-drive MP3 player that fitted 1000 songs in my pocket. In 2000 I had a Samsung cellphone with built-in MP3 player.

The problem was that both these products had badly designed hardware, poor useability and bug ridden firmware.

Today I have an iPod and it suits me fine, because it is well designed.

In fact it suits me better than the first generation iPod I had, which looked better, but was less ergonomic. The design has improved.

Which brings me to a line that was oft touted by VC's during the dotcom bubble - 'First Mover Advantage'.

From the Ebay auction site, to Google search engine to Microsoft OS to Apple MP3 players, none of them suffered from First Mover Disadvantage.