My interest in "digging" is dependent on the purpose (not that I have the time, anyway, mind you!). If the purpose is to say "here is a company that someone called a gorilla and it failed before its appointed time, hah, hah" then I am not at all interested ... not because I want to ignore evidence, but simply because I don't relate to Moore in that way in the first place. On the other hand, if the purpose is to examine why a company which seemed gorilla-like managed to not to maintain its advantage in the way that Moore would lead us to expect, then that could be valuable. To me, anyway, the goal here is understanding, not some simple rule of "pick X".
For example, Moore says that Gorillas are less needy of having top quality management than companies which do not have the gorilla advantage. This does not mean that a CEO of a Gorilla can't be such a flaming, egocentric idiot that he squanders his advantage to follow personal whims.
Similarly, from Moore we expect a company which becomes a Gorilla to be able to leverage this position by moving into new markets, thus extending the breadth and depth of their hold. But, suppose there aren't any ripe, related markets there for them to exploit or that they at least don't think of them and, instead, go into markets which are already heavily populated.
And look at the arguments we have had about Intel and whether it deserves to be called a gorilla because it had to share its control of its IP with AMD. Does anyone question that their dominance would be even greater if they hadn't had to do that? But, despite this, Intel has been calling the shots in a big, big sector for a long, long time, i.e., behaving like a gorilla and getting away with it, despite this supposed flaw in its perfection.
Understanding these things and how they are likely to impact the long term future of a company is interesting. Niggling over definitions and whether or not someone said something wrong once is not. |
