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

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (38204)	1/20/2001 11:44:34 AM
From: EJhonsa	Respond to of 54805

That's a pretty high standard for comparison, Eric. In what areas do you see the resemblance? The resemblance comes from the fact that SST's products, like Network Appliance's, utilize patented technology that allows them to offer significant cost advantages when compared to competitive offerings, all without foregoing on performance or reliability. All of this has allowed each company to quickly gain share in the low-end of their respective markets. Meanwhile, in both cases, the given company's products were scoffed at by "the establishment" of the industry that they happened to compete in as being unable to scale, even as each company rapidly increased the robustness of its offerings. In other words, both cases are classic Innovator's Dilemmas, with one possible difference being that, in Network Appliance's case, the competition is making a belated attempt to "move downstream," as evidenced by EMC's Chamelion and IBM's low-end NAS offering. On the other hand, so far, SST's competition has been following Christenson's script verbatim by quickly ceding the low-end to SST in the name of "moving upstream." This most telling sign of this came when Intel, of all companies, tapped SST to provide 2-8 Mb flash BIOS chips for their motherboard chipsets (http://www.ssti.com/news/news068.html). However, in retrospect, it seems that, given how far the company's progressed, SST currently seems to be where Network Appliance was in 1998, rather the 1997. Eric