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

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (12053)	12/5/1999 2:03:00 PM
From: Sam Johnson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Mike, You pushed my brain cells into high gear. It was you and Lindy and Piyush and Stan who made me repeatedly dive back into the manual the past few days, and then again this morning. Sort of like an ongoing game of gotcha in which everyone wins. <g> That context might explain why the authors call it a matter of degree. The gorilla is free of competition from the chimps but not the monkeys. I hadn't considered that...that may be what they meant, but it sounded more to me like they meant "more like a king...less like a gorilla" as a matter of degree. That's why I called them wishy-washy - it wasnt' clear exactly what they meant about an important point. I was the one who wrote Friday night that the gorilla doesn't control the chain, that that is not how gorilla games are played. OUCH! I couldn't find that. What page is it on, please? I'd like to review it in context. First off, I don't have the RFM yet (its on my Christmas list, so I'll be in big trouble if I buy it ahead of time), so the quote is on page 48 of the original manual, 1st paragraph. And the preceding 5 pages in Chapter 5 are interesting (I just reread them). In their initial explanation of gorilla power, the authors emphasize that their theory is based on the gorilla "as part of a larger ecosystem". Reading that entire section, I come away with a slightly different understanding than I had previously. I'ts not the proprietary open architecture or high switching costs that define gorilla power. Rather, it's their relationship to their value chain. . That's a huge distinction. Later on page 48 (jeez, does it sound like I'm quoting from a religious text?), they define how a gorilla gets it's power over the value chain. Drawing from the little I remember from my college logic class, they set proprietary, open, high switching, as necessary conditions for the preeminence over the value chain. But here's the kicker for me (and someone please correct me if they contradict this elsewhere in the book): a gorilla is NOT defined by proprietary, open architecture with high switching costs. Those are just the preconditions the authors believe are necessary to achieve the crucial feature of a gorilla, that is, the power over, and of, the value chain. So what if other preconditions can also lead to power over the value chain? What do you have then? If a company controls their ecosystem, is it important if they did it by the book? Interestingly enough, on the gg email list, their was a big stink a few months ago about Q not being a gorilla, since "a company can't become a gorilla because of their patent portfolio." Well, does the Q have the power of the value chain? Absolutely. So what if they achieved it through patents? I think that may be why this forum beat Geoff Moore to the punch on Qualcomm (and probably Gemstar) - he got stuck in his own preconditions, while the thread elders saw the truly important phenomenom taking place - a value chain with The Q at ground zero. Ok, now I'm going to go walk the dog. <G> Sam