I think the confusion might be the definition of 'new'. Something can be new without being the first of its kind, neither Bill Gate's OS or Larry Page's search engine were the first of their kind, but I think in both cases they were the first of their kind that I used. They were first to the markets that mattered maybe?
Neither were the first of their kind that I (or millions of others) used.
I'd used both CP/M and Apple DOS before MSDOS - neither were exactly niche products back then. And Altavista was pretty well established as the best search engine before the Google upstart appeared.
As for social media, Myspace had 100 million users in 2006 and wasn't passed in popularity by Facebook until a couple of years later.
All of these things were entrants into well established markets which had (at the time) heavyweight incumbents. They've all become vastly more successful than those incumbents, but that's not because they were inventing or even popularising a concept. These weren't obscure concepts that these people took mainstream, and there have been/will be other hugely successful entrepreneurs in every single one of these areas at some point.
I didn't mean "that I used" to sound egotistical, more a proxy for more serious adoption. MySpace was mainstream, but Facebook was a more serious consideration because (at least as I remember it) it didn't allow the quagmire of horrific CSS crud MySpace did. It felt mature and accessible. I remember the 'social media marketing' of Heroes S1, where the kid characters had MySpace accounts and the politician had a Facebook account. Equally millions had used DOS before, but Windows got to people who didn't want to touch the command line. I can't speak to why that isn't also the perception for Apple's GUI OSes.
"More serious adoption" is relative. At the time that DOS, Google and Facebook went mainstream, their competitors would quite definitely have been classed as having serious adoption. And when the things that knock those off their pedestal (some, particularly DOS, were knocked off many years ago), the things that follow them may well have even more serious adoption.
My point is that the author's claim that "You won't get rich, famous and powerful by building a better mousetrap. You can only do that by being the one person who creates or popularises a whole new market segment" is simply wrong and has been shown to be wrong time and time again - including by the very people he's using as examples.
