How could one take advantage of releasing very late?

There is talk about the minimal viable product and release early and often. These principles are fine in most circumstances, but what if you KNOW that your product will be far better than the competitors and you have the money to delay the release. How could you exploit this time gap to your advantage against the competitors? Could it ever pay off?

Well this arguement goes on with my clients andd staff all the time...

Can we just wait till it's better?

Sometimes the answer is yes... Having a framework that allows you to deploy new features and changes twice as fast is worth investing in as you will catchup and overtake.

Other times "just need this extra module" is usually a bad move .... The main reason being that normally you don't get clients on day one, you start talking to clients on day one and have a base to point at and talk about, by the time they have actually signed on your new module will be close to go live...

For the developer : releasing early and often allows the rest of the businesss, marketing and sales side to run in paralell not in series.

So to answer your question, yes, you answered it yourself ... The advantage of releasing later is a superior product... If you can convince the market of it.

If your looking for an example: Microsoft normally are late entrants to the market but they watch the problems all the early ones had and effectivy side step the version 1 issues.

You probably need to get the software into a user's hands early and often to know that it is better and you are moving in the right direction.

If delayed release == official launch and starting to charge, you could have a very long 'private' beta, then do the viral thing where a someone has to get three friends to apply for the beta before they get their invite.

If delayed release means getting no user feedback until late in the day, then I can't see that anything you do would outweigh the advantage of getting the software into a users hands early and often.

Depends on the app. If it app requires lots of customer data entry (or any other barriers to change) most of them will not change over because they have already got their data into another system.