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

To: DownSouth who wrote (15723)	1/19/2000 11:10:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Respond to of 54805

(The whole idea of a King morphing into a Gorilla is counter to the GG model.) If I understand the term, morph, correctly, the idea of a King morphing into a Gorilla will occur only in your best dreams. Morpheus is the God of dreams, so that's not entirely inappropriate. There are many companies that play various royalty and gorilla games at the same time. What's important is to recognize the distinctions between the two types of games because they remain distinctly unique. By definition, a King does not become a Gorilla. The closest thing to that is when a company that is a King in one market becomes a Gorilla in a different market. That, in my opinion, is NOT the same as a King morphing into a Gorilla. --Mike Buckley

To: DownSouth who wrote (15723)	1/20/2000 10:20:00 AM
From: John Stichnoth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Re Oracle as Gorilla or King--Maybe we don't have to agree on this, as long as we understand the issues. Oracle's "language" is unique to it, as are certain attributes of its RDBMS. These are open and proprietary, if I understand right. A significant value chain has developed around Oracle's product, exemplified by all of the programmers who know Oracle but don't know Sybase, for instance. This exemplifies Gorilla status in the large-scale database segment. Microsoft is attacking from below, and using its Gorilla status in adjacent areas to do so. Among other things, they are leveraging their position with Office, they are pricing SQL Server much lower than Oracle used to, they are pushing their suite of related tools heavily. btw, I see the Oracle price decrease as being (1) more apparent than real, since heavy discounts have always been available to enterprise buyers; this simply extends those discounts to smaller users, and (2) a response to Msft's discounting; Oracle is still more expensive, I think (But, can someone confirm this?). I see this as a classic clashing of Gorillas. Best, John

To: DownSouth who wrote (15723)	1/20/2000 11:49:00 AM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

Last months slashing of their retail prices by ORCL by 50% That wasn't a real price cut. The prior published price list was a joke -- just something to throw out at the start of the bargaining like the price a seller in a bazaar would first give to a tourist, hoping for a sucker. In practice, those prices were most often heavily discounted for the real sales. The revised list is an attempt to publish a price and make it real. For some types of customers it will be an increase. They are the King and can be de-throned by MSFT over time. MSFT will certainly nibble away at the low end, but I haven't seen any sign of them even remotely being able to compete at the high end, certainly not anytime soon. If anything, I would guess that ORCL was more vulnerable there to a technology shift, e.g., if OORDBMS started to become the thing to have and someone else suddenly emerged as the strong player in that flavor.