No product which cleans its competitors' clocks from the word go can be fairly described as rudimentary, regardless of the competitive landscape a decade later. If the motion picture cameras Chaplin was using ninety years ago seem rudimentary now, it's because our context is different. At the time, they were bleeding edge.
I sympathize with trying to motivate people to ship sooner and faster, but he's painting his examples as if they weren't world-beating hits, which only took time to go from solidly profitable to gargantuanly profitable.
It can mean "being in the earliest stages of development" or "basic; minimal"