Oracle

Oracle's origin story reveals the power of competitive exclusion through early colonization. In 1977, Larry Ellison read Edgar Codd's papers on relational databases and saw what IBM could not: the biggest business opportunity in computing history. While IBM sat on its own invention to protect its profitable IMS hierarchical database, Ellison shipped the first commercial SQL database in 1979—two years before IBM's DB2 reached the market. This is founder effects in action: the species that colonizes a niche first shapes all future competition. By the time IBM woke up, Oracle had established market dominance in a space IBM invented. Later, Oracle demonstrated incomplete temperature transitions, trying to maintain both perpetual and subscription models without clear direction, confusing customers and resulting in slow cloud growth. But the database lesson endures: inventing something doesn't guarantee you'll profit from it if you're too slow to commercialize.