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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates

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To: Mike Buckley who wrote (36349)	12/10/2000 1:27:22 PM
From: Todd Bishop	Read Replies (1) of 54805

However, with the exception of a very small amount of time that came years too late, Apple didn't license its OS to competing hardware manufacturers because it was also in the hardware business, unlike Microsoft. We can come to the conclusion that that was the big limitation of Apple or we can subscribe to Moore's conclusions in Inside the Tornado that it was their only reasonable alternative. That's a good point that we can apply to the classification of Juniper. They have an OS and are a hardware manufacturer. Cisco falls into this camp as well but it certainly hasn't hurt them. In fact, I've heard it suggested before that Cisco should license their IOS so that they could assure their control of the router market. They did so once with Cabletron years ago but they apparently decided that the hardware was too important of a market for them to let go of. This past year Nortel tried to upset Cisco by licensing their OS but I've seen no indication of success of this move. Their OS lacks the features that the market desired. Nortel's strength wasn't in their OS but rather their hardware and a GUI for configuring their OS which attracted customers who were looking for an easier solution than mastering Cisco's IOS. With this ease came drawbacks such as a lack of features for making a network reliable. Juniper is following in Cisco's footsteps with an OS which is similar enough to Cisco's IOS that engineers are finding as good as Cisco's if you only consider the features needed in the market segment that they are competing in. They also produce the hardware on which this OS runs. Unlike Apple, there is no Microsoft in this market so we have no reason to seriously fear a similar fate for Juniper. One could conclude that Juniper is, like Apple, a dominant chimp in a niche if the manual (and we) correctly classified Apple. I think that speaks to the issue that Apple at one time was a dominant chimp in niche markets. In the early days it dominated the education market (though maybe not because of its open architecture as much as because of its marketing plan?) and the market for manipulating video and graphics such as desktop publishing. While you are correct that the marketing plan had more to do with the education market, they led the desktop publishing or more specifically the graphic art market due to availability of software apps that were available on MacOS long before they eventually showed up on Windows. MacOS also supported multiple monitors on a single workstation years before Windows did which was a vital feature to the graphic artists I worked with. These are the types of features which our other Gorillas used to control their markets. So for our intents and purposes, they were perhaps the Gorilla of this niche. Juniper may be making a bid for a similar classification. Todd Bishop

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