A lot of emphasis is placed on the importance for entrepreneurs of innovation and creating your own market. Certainly, you are better off coming up with something novel than knocking off an existing product.

But being first-to-market is far from a guarantor of success. Many major markets are dominated by products and companies that came late to the party -- sometimes very late.

We've made a list of ten early giants in their fields that couldn't hold-off the late-comers. In some cases, they weren't literally the first to do something -- that's often a contested question anyway -- but rather the first to catch on.

Each was once on top. Today, they are all either dead or insignificant. Don't be like them.