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

To: sditto who wrote (28978)	7/27/2000 3:10:24 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 54805

sditto, We are having a communications disconnection of major proportions. I feel bad about that because you worked so hard finding quotes hoping to add to the communal knowledge base. About the quotes indicating the role that luck and timing play, I'm sorry if I gave you the impression that I disagreed with you about that. I agree entirely, always have and always will. Am I missing a different point you're trying to make? About your quotes showing that there are tornados without gorillas, we've always discussed in the folder that royalty games enjoy tornados that don't produce gorillas and that the tornados in gorilla games don't always produce a gorilla. Again, am I missing a different point you're making? ABout your quote supposedly (not trying to be cute) showing the conversion of a primate game to a royalty game, focus on the first sentence in it: "The problem for an investor is, at the outset of a market’s formulation, as it heads into the tornado, it is not always clear whether or not any gorilla candidate will actually achieve the goal of architectural control." I contend that this does not describe a change in the genealogy of the competitive landscape. Instead, it describes the muddy, unclear view on the part of the investor. Once that view becomes clear, it's easier to determine what kind of game is being played, but that is NOT the same thing in my mind as saying that the nature of the game changed before our very eyes. Moreover, that situation in the manual is very clearly a pre-tornado circumstance. In my previous post, I wrote that "You might be right but that's not my understanding once the tornado begins." Once the tornado begins! Remember that investors can't document with empirical evidence the existence of a tornado until at least 3 months after it has begun because we only get quarterly revenue reports, so I continue to stand by my thinking on that. We might have to agree to disagree. :) You've got two quotes dealing with your issue of loss of control of OPAs (open, proprietary architectures?) leading to a shift from primate to royalty structures. The one from page 62 of TRFM only says that no single vendor controlled the architecture. For me, that's not at all the same as saying the genealogy of the game changed. It merely says that without one vendor's architectural control, no particular vendor has tremendous strength over another vendor. I'm trying my best to find what the quote on page 63 suggests about a change in genealogy but I don't see it. Instead, it merely comments on the nature of Kings, not a shift from primate to royalty. About a wannabe gorilla losing control during the tornado, I again don't see where we disagree. We've always recognized that not all tornados produce gorillas in gorilla games, that some produce a gorilla that is not the most likely candidate at the start of the tornado, and , of course, that royalty games in tornado never produce a gorilla. What gave you the impression I'm not aware of that or that we disagree about it? About the process of crying foul in an attempt to derail the Gorilla Game, your quote from page 30 reflects pre-chasm and pre-bowling alley conditions. Your quote from page 36 is one sentence taken out of context of what happens just as the tornado begins. On the same page just above your quote, the manual sez "the market makes do with the de facto standard, basing these on the product architecture of the market-leading vendor." Then we get to your quote explaining that being aware of that process, competing vendors try to derail other vendors. And just a couple sentences below your quote the manual reiterates, however, that "as soon as a clear leader emerges, everyone wants to get on their bandwagon, and pretty soon no one is left in the race." And about about both of those quotes, I need to remind you again that my post was not about pre-tornado events. About your last quote, you put it under the subject of "derailing a Gorilla Game." That description of what U.S. Robotics attempted to do was just the opposite. It was trying to make a gorilla game out of a royalty game by hoping to convince the market to rally around its own proprietary architecture. It didn't work. I can't think of one example nor do I remember the manual describing an example that did work. I wrote you privately that I'd gladly send you a couple containers of page points if you show me the error of my ways. I'm not trying to be stubborn, but I'm very, very confused by the quotes you provided especially because I never have disagreed with any of them. But in the spirit of your hard work in attempt to improve the collective knowledge, please PM me your snail-mail address so I can send those suckers to you immediately! Is it okay if I go to bed now? :) --Mike Buckley