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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: voop who wrote (11298)	11/28/1999 10:32:00 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

voop, cfm and others, The topic of putting all one's eggs in one basket (one market segment) is very relative and will be forever misleading until you read Tornado. Even after reading the book, it is a subject that might be very difficult to decipher for non-insiders. That's my concern. cfm, Thanks for taking the time to put Gemstar through those questions. Interestingly, I disagree with your assessment that Gemstar put all its eggs in one basket. According to the book, management teams should not use bowling-alley strategies with consumer-based products. There are many reasons that I won't go into here, but let's sum it up by understanding that instead of using tactics to dominate vertical markets (bowling pins), managers of consumer-based products should skip past the bowling alley and market horizontally to blanket the landscape. In that sense, Gemstar has tried to do it. With regard to the program guides, management has gone after the following market segments (bowling pins) using a horizontal approach: * Content providers (NBC, AOL, WebTV and the like) * Consumer electronics manufacturers for the televisions, VCRs and set-top boxes (Thomson, Sony and the like) * Cable operators (US West, Deutsche Telekom and the like) Each of those is a market segment and most of them can probable be broken down into smaller segments. An example would be that televisions, VCR and set-top boxes are segments within the larger segment of CE manufacturers. See what I mean about how the subject of market segments is relative and might be understood only by insiders? The segment Gemstar has had by far the least success with is that of the cable operators. The settlement of litigation with TV Guide ends that problem. --Mike Buckley