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

To: nosmo_king who wrote (18363)	2/21/2000 10:46:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

nosmo, If it is considered a high cost, the gaming hardware certainly is a proprietary architecture that competes with other proprietary architectures. That makes it a gorilla game, but the question remains about how strong the gorilla can become relative to switching costs. I was really surprised to see that you can get a playstation for $80 - $90. That's not much money for a microprocessor, DVD, very fast RAM and Internet access. If the mainstay of the appliance is the gaming, you'd need to decide for yourself what constitutes high switching costs because that's the only proprietary part of the hardware. I'm not in tune to the consumer mass market to appreciate if the cost of having to buy a new set of games is enough to thwart switching to a new platform. Relative to a quote from the book: "while either one (info services and entertainment programming) can go into hypergrowth relatively easily and profitably, neither of them is based on proprietary architecture; nor can they create high switching costs" AOL offers info services and programming that can be accessed on a computer. The stuff inside the computer is what makes up the Gorilla games, not AOL's services or content. Remember that PlayStation is the "computer." To the extent that Sony offers its own games and other content that can be used on the PlayStation, those items aren't part of the Gorilla game but the hardware itself certainly is. As I mentioned above, though, if there are no high switching costs there will be no gorilla power. Hope this helps. --Mike Buckley