Ah, but Apple, the first mover in the modern smartphone era, has
87% of the profits. Incredible that they have almost all the profit from the market with only about 18% market share. Seemingly analogous situation shaping up for Tesla? They have such a head start on basically defining the entire competitive arena that everyone else is just a contender, even if they do catch up.
Comparisons between the car industry and computing industry are not perfect. Apple has always been a company focused on delivering both a hardware product as well as the OS running it. Back in the 80s, they had MacOS vs what was PC-DOS at the time. Microsoft balkanized the computer market by putting their own version of PC-DOS on the market called MS-DOS. Microsoft didn't really care what hardware their OS ran on, that was up to the manufacturer as long as the hardware met some criteria required by the OS to run (like the processor instruction set). Apple continued to tie their OS much more tightly to the hardware.
As a result, Microsoft ended up with close to 95% of the market share and Apple got by in single digits. When Apple introduced the iPhone, they again closely tied the OS to the hardware and sold both together. Google came out with Android soon after and took the Microsoft model. They made the OS, but any hardware maker could use it on their own phone. As a result, almost every phone maker but Apple uses Android and Android has a larger market share.
Apple has also always been more expensive than the competition's products. To their credit, Apple's products are well made. When they allowed Windows to run on their Mac computers, Macbook sales went up with many of the new users running Windows full time on the Apple hardware because Apple laptops were mechanically more reliable than anything else on the market.
Tesla is sort of like Apple in some ways. Tesla did go their own way with charging standards and their cars do cost more. But from what Elon has said, Tesla's goal is to sell mid-priced cars to the center of the market and maybe even have some inexpensive choices. They started as a premium brand because that was the best strategy to get into the market. They don't intend to remain only a premium brand.
And while Tesla has its own charging standard, they are very open to anyone else using it as long as they pay their share of supercharging use. Tesla has been made more exclusive by the rest of the car industry rejecting them, though they are deliberately exclusive in some other ways.
So the analogies between computing and cars starts to break down. Tesla has no plans to stay exclusive like Apple did, so they will probably gain a fairly decent chunk of market share down the line. How big it will be depends on how well the competition responds. If the fast, long range charging network does not improve dramatically in the next few years and nobody comes out with a reasonably priced 300+ mile EV soon, Tesla will dominate the EV market for a decade or more. So far the competition's offerings are getting better, but they still fall short of Tesla in key areas.
The Taycan is another example. It will only be available in small numbers (for at least a while), it will have poor range, poor cargo capacity, and will probably be paltry performer compared to the Roadster 2020. It may have better reliability, but we'll see. Tesla also knows how to support EVs and Porsche dealers probably won't know what to do with their Taycans.
"First mover advantage" isn't often what it's cracked up to be.
