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

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (18295)	2/20/2000 9:00:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Frank, Is "early mover status" a metric you found in the rfm, or was it borrowed from some other evaluation model? Assuming a company has an open, proprietary technology, its status as an early mover can be significant if the product category makes its way across the chasm. It's not necessarily true that the company that knocks down the most bowling pins first will be the strongest gorilla candidate, but if the company executes well in all other aspects it can be a tremendous advantage once the tornado forms. In other words, my thinking is that being first to market isn't as much a deterrent to competition as it is an enhancement of one's own attributes. --Mike Buckley

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (18295)	2/20/2000 9:06:00 PM
From: buck	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

UF, I could have sworn I read "early mover" in the book, but probably not in any metric sense. <g> It's been three weeks since I read it, so I'll have to look back. I am somewhat stretching the meaning of the standard here, but I do it with an eye to what Cisco has done with standards. BGP, for example, is a standard that is defined and controlled by an international standards group. Cisco was the first (or one of) company to implement and expand it. To date, there may be ONE other company, NT, that has implemented BGP and made it interoperable with Cisco routers. Others have tried and failed, 3Com for one. At this point, even though it's a standard, and even though others can work with it or around it, people still buy Cisco routers because they are guaranteed interoperability with every other Cisco router. This formed a significant part of the basis for Cisco's dominance as an internet device. Their continued innovation of "open standards" has kept Cisco in the forefront. Perhaps I'm being over-confident that a) the standard will be accepted, and b) Akamai can embed it enough to make it "their" standard. I don't think so, but that's purely an opinion based on witnessing their execution to date AND having Cisco with them in the standards definition process. These concerns were why I waffled on the classification. buck