From John Trenouth comes this excellent short deliberation on whether first to market is more advantageous than waiting for something well designed. Here is his post in full,

The oft parroted common wisdom is that to succeed you need to get your thing to market first. I generally skeptical of anything oft parroted. Sure the early bird gets the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese. Here are a few examples:

* VHS. Worse than betamax on nearly every level. What's a betamax?
* Quicken. At the time of Inuit's 1984 release of Quicken there had already been over 40 commercial software packages for personal finance
* Office. Know anyone who still uses Lotus123, VisiCalc or WordPerfect?
* World of Warcraft.Released at a time when there were countless MMORPGs, most of which also fantasy based, and it left them all in the dust
* Dyson Vacuums. Upstart company is devouring the tired old vacuum cleaner market
* Del.icio.us. Blink.com came first by years, had vastly more users, and more funding, but its long gone now and Del.icio.us is the gold standard for online bookmarking.

I suppose I am just a little biased. As a designer I seek to optimize the user's experience with a product and the value they get from it. But in a true first-to-market context the value is in the raw capabilities the new product's functionality exposes (i'll post on the related basis of competition issue shortly). So, first-to-market scenarios are primarily marketing plays, while best-to-market scenarios are iNPD (engineering, marketing and design) plays.

But if you really are first to market, that means your latent market has lived well enough without your product all these years. So would a few more days or weeks spent on design really be too much to ask?

One argument might be that "we have to ship 1.0 to start realizing revenue, then we'll let the designers do their thing." Of course downstream redesignings are, generally speaking, drastically more costly than upstream design.

Another argument might be "we need to move now and capture market share before our competitors do." Forget the myopia of letting your competitors define your product strategies, but if your competitors are in fact that hot on your heels then now is the time to start redesigning your product, not after you and your competitor both deploy roughly the same product at roughly the same time for roughly the same customers. Competition then becomes a big stalemated game of rock, paper, scissors.

Check out Ari Paparo's post about how his experiences at Blink show how it is more important to get it right than to get there first.