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

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (12121)	12/5/1999 8:54:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Respond to of 54805

Glad to know that the score is Frank 1, Juniper Bush 0. Regardless of our score at the end of the debate, we both win. First of all, it is not the bits and bytes that make high tech so special, so you don't have to be technical to understand what is going on <this rules out any more "carpetologist" excuses> Easy for Moore to say, a guy who has spent a career in the high-tech biz. If it's so easy, how did he miss the call on Qualcomm and Qualcomm's market by such a wide margin? Easy for you to say, too. :) Spend the first half of your life not giving a thought to how businesses make a profit (which is the case for many, many musicians and artists of all kinds) and spend the other half of your life understanding business but being clueless to the most fundamental aspects of how high-tech works (you'd probably be amazed how little time has passed since I learned the difference between software and hardware). That's the perspective of this carpetologist and millions all over the country to varying degrees. If someone with similar non-tech experiences for such a long time completely disagree, I'll give them my ear. But, honestly, it would be unfair of me to expect you to appreciate the learning curve one must go through. Just the terms in Gorilla Game are daunting for anyone new to the world of high technology. There really is a huge difference (the size of the Grand Canyon) between not having to be technical and understanding this stuff. Having said all that, the primary reason I thrive on gorilla gaming is because I have never seen the world of high-tech set in such an easy-to-comprehend framework. For that I will be forever grateful to Moore for providing the context and to you along with all the other people on this thread for being so wonderfully patient with us non-tech folks. In my opinion, your points #1 and #2 point out the alternatives avaiable to the adopters should they not prefer the NC or IC for awhile. You and I agree on your points. However, I was proposing that the NC and the IC are discontinuous innovations for the users who do adopt them, whereas I understood you to contend that it's not necessary that they be adopted at the desktop. True, but that's the case for any product. My analogy would be that, even today, it's not required that I use a touch-tone phone; that doesn't mean that it's not a discontinuous innovation. (Actually, I don't know if a touch-tone phone is discontinuous but the fact that I can still use a rotary-dial phone doesn't rule out the possibility that a touch-tone phone is discontinuous.) Therefore, I don't understand the relevance of your points. Retgarding your point that making fatter pipes [is] a continuous innovation, I'm stupefied. You really don't think cable (that requires digging up the ground, requiring almost every municipality to award a legal monopoly, requiring special modems and network interface cards that work only with cable laid by the television folks, etc.) is discontinuous? You really don't see that xDSL (requiring all sorts of head-end changes and yet a different kind of modem) is discontinuous? I'm really not being judgemental or critical in my surprise. Instead, our difference of opinion about that in my mind validates my point that sorting this stuff out is NOT as easy as Moore & Gang might have us believe. Carpetological excuses remain firmly in place. :) I'll try to find the stuff Moore wrote about so both of us can decipher it in context. But I can't promise when. I'll get back to you on that. The discontinuous innovation is a stand alone occurrence. Emotional willingness to embrace the changes only determines its rate of adoption. I disagree. Surprised? :) A company adopts sales force automation software. Getting the sales force to embrace it is entirely a different matter. The adoption has already taken place but it's so discontinuous and innovative that many people are slow to use it properly. To the extent that other companies learn of that problem as it relates to achieving the required return on the investment, and to the extent that those obstacles might deter other companies from adopting the product, I agree entirely with you. Surprised? :) --Mike Buckley