Scott Chacon, co-founder of GitHub, on Why GitHub Actually Won:
We cared about developers. But it wasn’t about when [our competitors] added Git, it never really mattered. They never had any taste. They never cared about the developer workflow. They could have added Git at any time and I think they all still would have lost.
You can try to explain it by the features or “value adds”, but the core takeaway that is still relevant to starting a startup today is more fundamental than if we had an activity feed or profile page or whatever. The much simpler, much more fundamentally interesting thing that I think showed in everything that we did was that we built for ourselves. We had taste. We cared about the experience.
What I love about this is he links to the classic Steve Jobs interview where Jobs blasts Microsoft (who now owns GitHub) for not having any taste.