<<When Eric and I mentioned that the tornado may result in a gorillaless market, that doesn't imply that it becomes a royalty game. Instead, it only implies that the game is made up only of chimps and monkeys.>>
I fully concur there can be tornados without a Gorilla. However, my operating belief is the default state of all games is royalty and if the tornado does not result in a Gorilla then we are left with a royalty game. This may be too fine a distinction to worry about since we are talking about relatively small differences in power between chimps, princes, monkeys, and serfs in a Gorillaless market.
Part of the distinction I was hoping to have Eric help us with is which markets do we think will be Gorillaless and why. Even if CDMA were completely taken over by committee(s) it would still be possible for a Gorilla game to result for companies controlling the architectures of wireless systems that transcend the air interface.
In some ways, I think Moore may have pointed us a wee bit astray on this issue of the role of standards (or at least did not present us with the complete set of tools for analyzing the role of architecture). As one example, I don't entirely buy his explanation of how Cisco dominated the hub and switch marketplace (i.e., the reason Cisco beat Bay Networks and Cabletron was because hubs were built on a standard). This certainly played a role but I would maintain the bigger role was hubs were more peripheral to the overall enterprise network architecture than routers.
In essence, I believe controlling the heart, mind, or spine of an architecture is far more important than whether a component of an architecture is standardized. Furthermore, a company's vision, knowledge, and experience with a standard can lead to development of architectures which they can control.
The technology industry is a complex adaptive system with many building blocks which provide countless opportunities for new architectures to emerge and be controlled by management teams adept at playing the Gorilla Game. |
