Apollo,
Sticking with your analysis, try a different perspective on for size.
We already know that companies can be Gorilla of this, King of that, etc, etc. Intel remains the Gorilla of earlier-generation PC-based chips.
We haven't examined if later-generation chips with new technologies generated tornados. Using your analysis, those newer markets might be royalty markets in which Intel is the super King.
If upcoming chips become discontinuous enough, are based on proprietary, open technologies, and if tornados come to fruition, Intel will be the Gorilla of those markets.
It might be a matter of semantics (nitpicking), but I don't think markets morph between primate and royalty plays. If a new product line is sufficiently distinct from previous products, it's simply a newer innovation, proprietary or not.
We can draw from history an example that perhaps more clearly explains this way of looking at the various chip markets. The mainframe computer was a Gorilla game (with IBM the Gorilla) yet the next wave of computing, mini-computers, was a royalty game. Using your analysis, the difference in computing was no more different than the difference in chips. The difference in the two examples is that Gorilla IBM didn't become the super-King of later-generation computers, whereas (using your analysis) Gorilla Intel did become the super-King of later-generation chips.
--Mike Buckley
P. S. By the way, I still think Intel is a Gorilla. :) |
