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

To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (42717)	5/17/2001 1:31:52 AM
From: Bruce Brown	Respond to of 54805

Do we consider other companies as overall gorillas based on 7% of their product? Seems to me that, if routers are only 7% of Cisco's business, then either this isn't what makes Cisco a gorilla or Cisco isn't one. Then you need to break down the router market share via revenues and growth via the quarterly Dell'Oro reports. I posted the latest on the Juniper board following the report's release: Message 15812161 Here's a clip from one of the linked articles concerning just the high end router market (not the OC-3 to OC-12 market which had sales of $544 M in Q1): "The total size of the router market fell 10 percent to $753 million in the first quarter of 2001 from the previous quarter, the largest decline since 1997. The only other time the market declined was in 1998 from the first to second quarter, when router sales dipped from $26 million in the first quarter to $25.7 million in the second quarter." How's that for high end router industry growth? $26 M in Q1 of 1998 to $753 M in Q1 of 2001. If you run the margins on the respective leaders in each of the segments, it's hard to make the comment that routers are a simple commodity. At least not in the analogy of a PC being a commodity product. BB

To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (42717)	5/17/2001 9:36:27 AM
From: Judith Williams	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Thomas-- wholeness can easily include a component that has been commoditized I think this point is an important one and may need amplification. End-to-end solutions don't remain static nor do they stay on the same place in the TALC. Clayton Christensen commented on this phenomenon in a recent conference. "Immature" companies in technology tend to thrive by offering "whole" solutions. Mature companies by contrast, he believes, gravitate to the components within the "whole" for innovation and thus are more subject to commoditization. --Judith Williams

To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (42717)	5/18/2001 12:35:17 PM
From: Pirah Naman	Respond to of 54805

In TFM, the authors state somewhere early on that all networking equipment must be compatible to CSCO's standard. But in the case study on CSCO, Paul Johnson covers a series of four tornados in which CSCO took part, and states that CSCO was the gorilla in routers, but became a king in the other technologies. I don't recall the authors ever reconciling these two somewhat divergent viewpoints. BTW, what ever became of that portfolio of Paul Johnson networking tornado picks that somebody was tracking? - Pirah