Can slowness be a competitive advantage ?

I always find it interesting to see how attitudes towards the Internet are in many ways so different in Germany than in Ireland. Of course, it is always risky to draw conclusions based on non-scientific data, such as data from simply speaking to people and watching the overall flow of news, but I believe there are always some conclusions that can be made. And one is, that the Internet is viewed in a much more critical way in Germany than in, for example, Ireland. 

This includes issues such as data privacy, the impact of Internet on, for example, children and youths, the role of social media, especially Facebook (and its much disputed ‘like button’), Internet addiction etc. I will come back to some of these topics at a later stage, but what struck me today was a news article, which reported that Microsoft’s Streetside encountered far less resistance in Germany than Google’s Street View, with ca. 240,000 people in Germany asking Google to exclude their house from view compared to only ca. 90,000 requesting the same from Microsoft.

This raises several questions in my mind as to what might be the cause of this change in objections:

• Are times changing and are people becoming more used to what could and – in Germany – very much tends to be perceived as invasion of privacy
• Why did Microsoft choose such as ‘difficult’ market as one of the first European markets (after UK) to introduce Streetside ? 
• Was there less concern about Streetside in Germany, simply because of the relative unimportance of Microsoft’s search engine Bing in the German market, versus the prevalence of the Google search engine ? 
•  Was Microsoft’s proactive approach (see: http://www.microsoft.com/maps/streetside.aspx) towards dealing with data privacy concerns better than the rather reactive approach to issues  that Google adopted ? 
• Is it sometimes better not to be the first in bringing out of new product ?

The last question, in particular, is an interesting one to explore: New technology, especially technology that is aimed at the wide masses and impacts everyday life can have a longer adoption cycle. This gives the competition, especially the close follower in the market, a great opportunity to let the trailblazer do all the hard work in terms of educating and converting the market, while the competitor can use the time to fine-tune and optimize both the product and the approach to market. As Microsoft clearly did in this case, entering the market later, but very proactively in terms of the data privacy issues and also entering the market with added functionality, such as integration of Streetside with Flickr geo-tagged photos, which, I think, is a real treat indeed.

But there is of course a risk to such a delayed approach and we see it play out in the similar way in the fight for market share between Facebook and Google+ at the moment: With most people only using one application of the same type, can the late-comer convert and win back the early adopters and win critical mass?What do you think ?