I personally don’t subscribe to that particular notion. It can be useful in some narrow cases where the point of a “product” is to ensnare as many humans as possible into its way of doing things. The idea being, if your “product” becomes the Kleenex of sharing photos with friend lists, then you get to sell your idea for fifty ka-trillion dollars to Facebook (which is, it should be noted, itself an exception to this rule as it decidedly wasn’t the “First to Market” and yet managed to do quite well taking over Friendster, MySpace, LiveJournal/status blogging (to an extent) and nearly Twitter). There are other scenarios as well, but all of the ones I can think of are equally narrow.
I started using Scrivener in the middle of the last decade, even though it wasn’t the “First to Market” on the Mac either. It superseded the tools that I was using at that time, even combined many of them into one single interface. In short, it presented a small but crucial evolution to how I had been working and that was enough to jump ship on all of these “First to Market” and at-then-best-of tools. That’s really where the urgency marketting models miss the boat: for stuff that we invest a huge chunk of our life in, it doesn’t matter who is first, it only matters which is best for how we work. When it comes to choosing how you will spend four, six, or ten hours a day of intense mental thought, you aren’t going to be a fickle customer that only uses Facebook because everyone else does or this snapshot program instead of that one because it got popular. So that’s a whole category of stuff that doesn’t fit into the urgency model, and I’d submit Scrivener is deep within the what works best arena, not the what works first arena.
Secondly, I’d suggest that whole way of thinking is a bit flawed in the first place, even from within the narrow confines upon which it does work. Software and services are ever evolving. New stuff comes out that innovates on the older ideas and ways of working. The edge of that is always going to be the most contentious, obscure, and risky. It is certainly possible that one of the alpha level idea makers will become That Next Big Thing, but if you look at the biggest of the Big Things that exist in software today, you will find scarce examples of them. Where are the First to Markets these days? How many people even know what the first spreadsheet program is? A history buff + geek might know it’s VisiCalc, but I bet a lot of people would think it’s Lotus 1-2-3. I don’t think Microsoft is worried about either of those. What was the first search engine? It wasn’t Google.
Even in the shallow software market (I don’t mean that in a negative fashion, I mean that to denote software that you can wade into and there is no deep end of it, like Twitter) where “First to Market” makes more sense, you don’t see many of the original innovators on the tips of people’s tongues. The only scenario that really makes sense to me is the first one: you specifically set out to come up with an idea that you hope you can sell for millions to some established software dynasty and then retire. That’s certainly not what we have in mind for Scrivener on the iPad!
The idea that someone would become so flustered with a release date that they refuse to use a superior solution out of habit doesn’t ring right with me. We’d all still be using WordStar otherwise.
We would have loved to get it out by November 1st, and I wouldn’t rule it out entirely, but I’d say it’s unlikely. Development with attention to detail takes a long time.
It’s going to be awesome, but it will be very stripped down when compared to the Mac version, because iOS is not capable of running a full version of Scrivener. It will be a great mobile version of Scrivener, though - thus, it takes time.
