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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates
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To: Uncle Frank who wrote (29065)7/28/2000 12:18:26 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh  Read Replies (2) of 54805
 
Doesn't your example validate Merlin's point?

If we had hundreds or thousands of examples of gorillas to draw upon and the only way in which any of them ever became derailed had been a subsequent discontinuous innovation, then I might be prepared to cede to a "sure thing". Given that we only have a handful of cases, some of which like PSFT are mixed, then no, I'm not at all prepared to say that is the only way a gorilla can fall.

All of which only underscores my point that these categories we use are not pure types. If a company has a lock on a really fundamental DI on some hardware bit and does something like fall short in production capacity, they can probably weather a rather long period because the demand will be there and is not easily satisfied by any alternative. Had ORCL stumbled any more than they did and had they had stronger competition at the time, I think they could well have been unseated, exactly because there was nothing in their technology that couldn't be duplicated by others. To be sure, switching costs and such would have helped prop them up, but if the financials had been bad enough and this led to slow down in development while others leapt forward, I think they could have lost their position. It didn't happen, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen to someone else.
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