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

To: Eric L who wrote (32925)	10/8/2000 2:12:49 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

This is a VERY KEY point. This event was what made INTC a gorilla. It is what gave it a lock on CPU technology, not what gave it away. It is possible for both to be true. The act of granting the license was key to the transition locking in the x86 architecture in the market. For some time afterward we saw a classic example of a gorilla and a monkey in which the monkey only got so much of the market as the gorilla granted it, forcing the monkey to go after table scraps and changing the rules just often enough to keep the monkey scrambling. But, lately the monkey seems to have taken the initiative and actually seems to be doing better at moving that architecture forward than Intel. This might seem like the tail wagging the dog, but that doesn't make it any less real. This is not how the gorilla-chimp relationship is supposed to work and seems to me to be proof that however powerful the forces supporting the gorilla, one does still have to execute -- no market power is infinite. Intel appears to be trying to take back the controlling position by moving to a non-x86 architecture for 64 bit. If they establish it, they will have taken control again, but what if the market decides it would like to stick with x86?

To: Eric L who wrote (32925)	10/8/2000 5:06:56 PM
From: saukriver	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

repeated so deleted

To: Eric L who wrote (32925)	10/8/2000 5:13:10 PM
From: saukriver	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

I find that one even harder to swallow than INTC all of a sudden becoming a King which I find very hard to swallow. I am not for one minute offering that Intel as a gorilla suddenly became a king. I am suggesting that Lindy was correct that it was not a gorilla to begin with. Moore's statements and examples about Intel's gorillahood in the manual are numerous So what? I readily concede that TRFM--while the single most useful construct for assessing technology investments--is not inerrant. The first half of TRFM is pretty solid in laying out the method of analysis. The second half is weaker in application. Chapter 12 smacks of "making it up us as we go." Geoffrey Moore was quite slow to assess Qualcomm's gorillahood. Why not be equally suspicious of how quickly he annointed Intel? He was too quick to conclude Intel is a gorilla and in that instance should have applied his own criteria more rigorously. There must be something more to the argument that Intel is a gorilla than (1) the book says Intel is a gorilla, (2) if you were too stupid to understand the book, even the some of the headings in the book suggest it is a gorilla, (3) like gorillae, Intel has a pile o' cash, (4) like many gorillae, INTC spends alot on R&D, (5) Intel has a history of strong management, or (6) INTC performed very well in the first 8 months of this year. None of those is an argument that Intel is a gorilla. None of them addresses the fact that Intel traded proprietary control of the CPU architecture for ubiquity when it licensed the x86 architecture to AMD. Intel is a king that executed superbly for many, many years against very weak hands, and Geoffrey Moore should have recognized as much. We have heard for at least 4 years that Intel may dominate the 64-bit architecture (first code named Merced, then Itanium(sp?)). (Is the reason for Intel's slowness in rolling out Merced, or whatever it nows calls 64-bit, is because the 64-bit architecture will hurt existing x86 sales. Shades of Polaroid.) I grant you--as indeed one has to--that Intel may control the 64-bit architecture. But that is a "wait and see" argument. saukriver