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

To: Apollo who wrote (36452)	12/12/2000 9:21:37 AM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

Apollo, Sticking with your analysis, try a different perspective on for size. We already know that companies can be Gorilla of this, King of that, etc, etc. Intel remains the Gorilla of earlier-generation PC-based chips. We haven't examined if later-generation chips with new technologies generated tornados. Using your analysis, those newer markets might be royalty markets in which Intel is the super King. If upcoming chips become discontinuous enough, are based on proprietary, open technologies, and if tornados come to fruition, Intel will be the Gorilla of those markets. It might be a matter of semantics (nitpicking), but I don't think markets morph between primate and royalty plays. If a new product line is sufficiently distinct from previous products, it's simply a newer innovation, proprietary or not. We can draw from history an example that perhaps more clearly explains this way of looking at the various chip markets. The mainframe computer was a Gorilla game (with IBM the Gorilla) yet the next wave of computing, mini-computers, was a royalty game. Using your analysis, the difference in computing was no more different than the difference in chips. The difference in the two examples is that Gorilla IBM didn't become the super-King of later-generation computers, whereas (using your analysis) Gorilla Intel did become the super-King of later-generation chips. --Mike Buckley P. S. By the way, I still think Intel is a Gorilla. :)

To: Apollo who wrote (36452)	12/12/2000 10:10:54 AM
From: Judith Williams	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Apollo-- Intel, the super king? Your post hits all the key points I have been struggling with for my JDSU network report. Market dominance for both Intc and JDSU seemed to warrant some special attention. It also struck me that both are heavily committed to manufacturing. Categorizing gorilla/king may be more complicated when the company is a supplier to OEMs. Standards of excellence or dependability in their respective product lines becomes key, not just breakthrough technology. Both lock-in customers with best-of-breed, but the measure includes all sorts of non-technological factors. This point is perhaps even more critical for JDSU, since its products often go underwater and no one want to fiddle with faulty hardware in undersea pipes. But they also aggressively pursue r&d, perhaps too much in our minds at the incremental rather than the discontinuous level, which makes leaning toward kingship easier. Perhaps we should have another category--the kind of power an Intc or a JDSU wields has to do with deliverability, being designed into the basic process, and scale. The sheer size and capital investment make barriers to entry high. How about emperor? Emperors are acquisitive and could very well morph into gorillas by carving out a niche within their diverse holdings. Were JDSU to come up with the building blocks for an optical router/switch module for a customer like Sycamore (which does no manufacturing and depends on suppliers' r&d), I would hazard that it would begin just that kind of morphing. --Judith