
That's unheard of! When starting a new business, if you really want to make it big, it has to be more than just starting a new business. You have to start a new concept, trend, or niche. Look at any franchise, the founders are usually the wealthiest in the "food chain," then come the franchisees and so on. Take a look at Google, it dominated search, then there were multiple search engines that came along after Google was named king, but Google was and is still the master of search.
Now, it isn't true that you have to come up with a new concept in order to succeed because surely, Yahoo was around before the Google days, but Google still dominated the search industry. This shows that just because you started a concept, you might not dominate it. Yahoo still gets more page views with the number one Alexa web rank and dominates the web news industry. Google has entered the markets for news, but people still resort to Yahoo for that more than Google from what I see. Another example would be Friendster and MySpace. Friendster was around since 2002, in which it had been the successful in breaking the ground to social networking, but it had not done much after that. MySpace came along and took over the original concept, but allowed users to tweak their profile in newer and better ways. If innovation is not kept going, a company can soon face being taken over or even worse- surpassed and left in the dust.
It should be kept in mind that when trying to innovate new ideas into an existing business, the quality should be consistent, if not improving. The web browser business is a great example of this. Internet Explorer was always what people were using in the beginning of the internet era, soon after there were competitors, but none significant until Mozilla Firefox came along. The reason why Firefox was able to "steal" Internet Explorer users, is simply because they had a more secure and faster browser. Although Internet Explorer still has the largest user base, there are competitors slowly creeping up due to lack of quality.
After your business becomes an authority, you don't have to stick to the original concept of the business you are involved in because surely you will want to enter other industries. With that authoritative image, more respect will be given to your brand and it will be easier to acquire and dominate other markets. Since Google's authority in search, they have captured other web markets such as RSS feeds with Feedburner, the email industry with Gmail, the blogging industry with Blogger, the video industry with YouTube, and much more.
