1. (answer)
It depends on the market. In some markets first mover advantage isn't necessarily so strong as the innovation or differentiation is easily copyable so in a short amount of time you find your self with a lot of competition and you have nothing more to offer. In some cases the first mover gets even eaten by the second wave of entrants in that market as he has lost time and effort into opening up a market that others can take advantage of:
- LEVIS jeans, they created the "jeans" but then 000s of companies started producing jeans and they just became one among others.
- IBM, the same they lost their competitive advantage after few years due to extreme competition and they eventually stopped 100% working on the PC products (it became Lenov0)
- The entire automotive industry is exactly like that.
I believe that if we want to talk about genuine first mover advantage we should look at companies that retained across their entire life cycle that advantage which makes then being at the forefront of their domain, for example:
- Microsoft with Windows: it's been 20 years and there hasn't been a single competitor (Apple Mac OS only recently became a competitor and only for the market segment that can afford to buy a Mac. In the mid and low end they still are alone. And Linux OS are for geeks, no one else can use it)
- CocaCola: Thousands of copycats, still number one in their core value proposition.