To: Kent Rattey who wrote (5080 ) 5/30/2000 3:15:00 AM From: Puck Respond to
Gilder is terribly wrong in his use of Microsoft as an example supporting his hypothesis and about the reasons he proposes for its success to date: being a leader and sustaining its "learning curve ahead of all followers". Microsoft's great successes were not as a leader but as a follower: stealing the concept of the graphical user interface in creating Windows from Apple, which stole the idea from Xerox, and then with Internet Explorer aping Netscape Navigator. (In fact DOS, itself, was purchased from another company, actually a high school teacher/programmer-hobbyist who created it in his spare time, to meet the demand of the IBM contract for a PC OS which Microsoft promised to deliver impossibly soon.) Microsoft let other companies hit the beaches of new markets/products first and then used its full force to attack and overwhelm these putative first movers after they had completed the dirty work of creating, clarifying, and defining the incipient market and its direction; and, most importantly, demonstrating its significance. As a follower, Microsoft let others take the big risks and then rode to triumph on the pavement of their pioneering achievements. Microsoft's strategic success as a follower provides an unequivocal and definitive counter example to the Gorilla Theory, debunking once and for all the mistaken notion that the vast majority of the spoils from the creation of new markets invariably flow to the initial exploiter. This sometimes is the case, but, as Microsoft demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt, sometimes not. Gilder should really be embarrassed about this egregious weakness in his argument. It seems to me that he has committed the academic sin of concocting a pretty theory and then forcing reality to fit it, using apocryphal data if need be, instead of building a theory logically upon the results of objective, dispassionate observation.
