Lindy,
After following your "death march" though the Front Office companies the last year,...
Yep, I've been quick to point out the fundamental meltdowns. On the other hand, how many industries or subindustries can you think of that continue to show long-term growth in excess of 50%? And in how many of those industries could you have bought the top four leaders and wound up with an 81% annualized return through the last 13 or so months? If there has been a death march, maybe the guy beating the drum on the way to the scaffolds has been doing it too loudly. (Me. :)
A: There is no Gorilla,
B: We ain't in the Tornado
Or:
C: These companies may turn into a bunch of princes whose stocks are not going anywhere.
Is it okay if I handle those in reverse order? (You don't really get a choice. :)
C: There's no question that most of the companies will turn into lower echelon entities, whether they are plays in royalty or the animal kingdom. That's inherent in gorilla games. There's at most one that ends up as a gorilla.
B: The more I think about that, the more I'm convinced that the term, tornado, isn't defined clearly enough in the book. Look at every page referenced in the index and you'll get a feeling of why I mention that. It's easy to determine if there is a tornado if the sequential revenue is up 30% for a few quarters, or if there has been a 300% annual increase, but anything less than that is very ill-defined by the authors.
Honestly, I don't know if there has been a tornado in the front office. According to Geoff Moore, Silicon Valley has declared Siebel the gorilla of the front office. His book clearly states that all gorillas come from tornados. If Siebel is a gorilla, there must have been a tornado. But I never saw it.
That leads to your first point.
A: Ah, but as I mentioned, there is a gorilla according to Moore. Siebel certainly dominates the CRM space. And Remedy owns 25% of its help desk market.
I think you are "waist deep in the big muddy", and it's time to move on!
Siebel's revenue grew from $8 million in 1995 to $392 million just three years later. Sure, they were helped by their acquisition of Scopus. But that's still a 544% average annual increase. So far, we're talking about the fastest growing applications software company in the history of applications software. I'll stick with my Siebel for awhile. :)
--Mike Buckley |
