If ever an exemplar were needed of the phenomenon known as “first-mover advantage,” then you need look no further than to Boeing’s “Connexion” inflight WiFi service, which it has just this week announced it will be discontinuing, entailing the disbanding of 560 employees and the acceptance by Boeing shareholders of a one-off $320M charge on this year’s balance sheet.

Mention of “Connexion” at once leads me to recall how, seven whole years ago, I stood up in the Hilton Hotel in New York City to launch Wireless Developer’s Journal – the original press release is still here, in fact. We were very much first out of the gate, immediately becoming for example the only technology magazine to dare ask, "Is WAP Crap?" (v.1 n.1, our premier issue).

The organizing principle of the magazine (which by the time it was launched we'd renamed Wireless Business & Technology) was to bring readers each month the most insightful coverage of wireless developments available anywhere - direct from CTOs and CEOs and CIOs, from developers and IS managers...in other words, from actual participants in the industry itself. Before long this unique perspective led us follow each and every one of what became over time the huge success stories of the day, like i-mode, BlackBerry, Sprint PCS, and 802.11b.

With contributing editors of the caliber of Ron Dennis (Wi-Fi editor), Bill Ray (initially Bluetooth editor, and later editor-in-chief), Tim Bresien (venture capital editor), and Daniel Scuka (Japan editor), among others, it wasn’t difficult to keep our watch set fifteen minutes ahead of everybody else’s.

Accordingly we were the first magazine to cover Connexion – possibly due to my wanting more than anything else in the world to be able to edit a fast-growing group of magazines at 35,000 feet!! – but it somehow never got the traction with air carriers that it had counted on. The problem was that in many ways (it wasn’t rolled out until 2004) it was too slow out of the gate…exposing it to the risk of being superseded almost before it had even really been brought properly to market - which it was, by cellular solutions to the same problem that Boeing’s engineering team had decided to solve via more expensive satellite.

In the wild new west of Web 2.0, the whole notion first-mover advantage is even more clearly demonstrated to be valid. In the world of powerful applications being made available to the masses via the Web, first-mover advantage is everything. Once someone has released a wordprocessing app as good as Writely.com, there just isn’t any likelihood, in most analysts’ view not just mine, for another player. Google, it seems, agreed!

The same is true of online auctions (eBay) and online bookselling (Amazon.com) – once a major category has been colonized by a credible player and validated by the masses, the barrier to entry for anyone wishing to dislodge the incumbent becomes prohibitive.

In the Web 2.0 world, as every would-be web2preneur knows, the institutional investors are a whole lot savvier than they were in the days of Bubbledom, they will look – and are looking, 24x7x365 – with laser-like focus for those Web 2.0 apps that not only have the whiff of greatness about them but which also are being progressed in timely fashion and brought to market first, not second. And certainly not third.

There is one alternative, mind you: create a category, and thereby be first there by definition. In this age of The Wisdom of Crowds, good luck with that, because even having gotten there first, that Web 2.0 app still needs to be the absolute best.