What opportunities is there for seven-year head starts?

Jeff Bezos describing how it's normal to only have a 2-year head start in tech, but due to the skepticism in tech towards 'people buying cloud infrastructure from a bookseller', they had a seven year headstart with AWS.

"Google has repeatedly told journalists that it started extracting data from Street View imagery in 2008, as part of its “Ground Truth” project. So this suggests that Google may have a 6+ year lead over Apple in data collection." Google's lead over Apple Maps.

the iPhone when first released was easily 7-5 years ahead of all other competitors (as demoed by the death of Nokia, Blackberry and the amount of time for Google's Android to reach parity).

In the telecoms industry, what is the equivalent of this 'seven-year moat'?