I did a bit of sleuthing and came up with this....

Here's Gordon's post that you were asking about.... (I hope Gordon doesn't mind me linking to this....)

Gordon talks about finding successful classified ads by checking whether the ads have been running for a while in the same magazine. Michael Ross and were inspired by this idea, and we now do this in The Great Ideas Letter.

Twice a month, we identify at least one or more classified ads which have been running (usually for over a year) in a newspaper or magazine, and report about it. These indicate successful ads and successful business niches....

By the way, I re-read my own post, and something else struck me....

My post by the way (that Tim referred to), you can read here:

http://www.netguerrilla.org/wwwboard/messages/220.html

I write there about SECOND mover advantage.... The advantage that the SECOND business in a market has. The advantage is that they don't have to EDUCATE the market....

Now, when you think about it - Microsoft has almost always had the SECOND mover advantage. They were not the first in word processors, spreadsheets, servers, etc. But their products such as Word, Excel, their NT servers are all dominant....

Of course, they have some advantages that ordinary businesses don't have, but it's interesting that the "first mover advantage" is not really as great as it's often made out to be....

There ARE some advantages - Coca Cola had the first mover advantage in the cola market, and is still the number one cola today. But they almost lost their lead to Pepsi at one stage.... You can read about it in the book "Marketing Warfare" by Al Ries and Jack Trout. (One chapter of their book is about the "Cola wars"....)

- Dien Rice