Yesterday I was reading National Geographic's Africa Special and there was an interesting article on how Africa being the first continent to host homo sapiens is now the poorest continent of the seven. According to the author in this case the difficulty in agrictultural development and the geography of the black continent played an important role in undermining its development and progress.

This morning I was reading Lindsey Vereen's Editorial in October's STP Magazine and he wrote an insight about what it entails to be the first in a market. Diners Club was the first card accepted by multiple vendors but since its debut in 1950 it now retains only 1 percent of the credit card market. Some of the difficulties pioneers face are the difficulty to identify what the market wants, and being vulnerable to potential competitors who can take advantage of the road you've paved for them.

Being a pioneer isn't a guarantee to ongoing success and web search technology and the British football team are another two proofs, but sometimes it pays to be first. In software litigation on the intellectual property of code you might gain the better hand in court if the code forensic analysts manage to find the original spark in your source code.