Studying the numbers on the dice, Gates said, “This is a non-transitive dice. You choose first.”
Non-transitive dice confer advantage to the 2nd mover.
fundooprofessor.wordpress.com/2005/11/06/bil…
Tick-tac-toe is one such game.
If you get the first turn, and you put your mark on the center square in the grid, you have an unfair edge in the game.
How about the real world?
In 70s, Robert Taylor's tiny company was first to introduce liquid soaps.
Colgate Palmolive, a FMCG giant, could have easily crushed Taylor by introducing their own liquid soap.
It could not.
How?
Liquid soaps require plastic pump dispensers. There were only 2 suppliers for these pumps.
Taylor purchased the entire supply of pumps that those two suppliers could produce for next 2 years.
You could call Taylor's move a shrewd manoeuvre.
But I see that as an instance of someone taking the advantage of being the first mover.
Colgate Palmolive was forced to buy Taylor's company.
Neither was Facebook the first social network.
Amazon wasn’t the first e-commerce company either.
And Apple certainly wasn’t the first company to create personal computers. It was IBM.
Being first, Uber had to muscle its way through industry regulations.
Lyft didn’t have to shell out a single dime to deal with regulatory hurdles. Uber did it for Lyft.
There is no shame in being a second-mover.
inc.com/bill-green/wan…
Suddenly they saw God approaching the man ahead of them.
“What’s God going to tell that man?” worried the Devil's friend.
“God is enlightening him with the supreme truth,” said the Devil.
“Oh, not at all,” the Devil replied, “I am going to let him organize the truth into a religion.”
Devil clearly preferred being the second mover.