4 ms·

>>Lesson: never fight a dominant incumbent in its own game. You will get killed. Play a different game. Better yet, invent a new game where you know the rules b

by kinkora 13y ago

>>Lesson: never fight a dominant incumbent in its own game. You will get killed. Play a different game. Better yet, invent a new game where you know the rules best. What about Google[1], Apple[2], Facebook[3], etc? Not disagreeing with you but I'm genuinely curious on what you think about these companies. I probably can think of many more examples but these are the ones that sprang to mind when thinking of companies that "fought the dominant incumbant in its own game".

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
continuations 13y ago
1) Google - when Google came into existence in late 90's there were no dominant search engines. The orthodoxy at that time was that there was no money in search. Accordingly nobody wanted to be a search engine and everyone tried to be a portal. The dominant player back then - Yahoo - emphasized its use of human editors and partnered with AltaVista and Inktomi for search. So Google never really defeated a dominant search engine - it merely took advantage of a giant vacuum in the market. 2)Apple - Apple never defeated Microsoft in the PC game. Instead it focused on emerging markets: ipod, iphone, ipad. Eventually these new products (smartphones & tablets) became powerful enough to erode the PC market. Even now Microsoft is still dominant in the PC market. It's just that PC is no longer where the action is at. 3)Facebook - there were no dominant players in social networking when facebook was founded. Myspace was the biggest player, but "big" was a relative term back then. Even at the height of its popularity the vast majority of the population was not Myspace users. Sure if you were 16 year old in 2004 then you were probably on Myspace. but outside of that demo Myspace was far from dominant. Most people were not on any social networks. In short it was a wide open market. I'm sure there are examples where a challenger took on a dominant incumbent head on and won. But those are the edge cases. You pretty much need all the stars to align perfectly to have a chance. It's not a strategy I'd bet on.
- k__ 13y ago
  1) Google > Apple in mobile 2) Apple > Nokia in mobile 3) Facebook > Google in ads
  - thedrbrian 13y ago
    What exactly do you mean by google > apple in mobile?
    - k__ 13y ago
      After Apple hit the marked everyone was buying an iPhone. Now most of the people have Android phones.
      - fpgeek 13y ago
        Not really. While the iPhone has been influential and a huge success for Apple, it didn't really kill any of existing smartphone incumbents. "Everyone" was only buying an iPhone for fairly limited values of "everyone" (e.g. excluding several continents). Instead, Android killed off those incumbents, taking advantage of the opening the iPhone had created. So it's really Google > Nokia (Symbian), Microsoft (Windows Mobile), Palm and RIM, with Apple off to the side somewhere. And the complex, multi-faceted Apple vs Google battle in mobile isn't an upstart vs an incumbent, it is a battle of two upstarts who have become the incumbents.
  - continuations 13y ago
    1)Apple was never a dominant incumbent in mobile. It focused narrowly on the high end market. For the vast majority of the population, especially in emerging markets like Asia and Africa where Andrioid is now the strongest, iPhone was simply unaffordable. Google didn't fight Apple head on but instead take advantage of its weakness in the mass market and open sourced Android which resulted in a flood of low cost smartphones that quickly capture a large majority of the market, the part of the market where Apple never had much of a presence to begin with. In short, Google played a different game. 2) Nokia rose to power on simple cellphones. It was never a dominant player in smartphones. In fact smartphone was a wide open market with no dominant players when Apple entered that market. So Apple never needed to fight any incumbent. 3) Google still sells 10X more ads than facebook, so it's rather premature to say facebook has beaten google in ads. And even if that does happen eventually, it'd be because facebook avoided fighting google in search ads (unlike Microsoft tried to with Bing) but instead invented the new market of social ads & newsfeed ads. Once again it's the strategy of avoiding fighting the dominant incumbent in its own game and inventing a new game instead.
- Poyeyo 13y ago
  1) I remember AltaVista to be clearly dominant in the search engine space. Yahoo was not the dominant player in search, and never has been, they were a curated directory of sites.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
I'm not sure whether it was intended or not, regardless, one can take "game" to mean much more than merely "market". If you play by the same rules, same norms, same fundamentals, etc. as hugely entrenched businesses then you'll often fail. But that's not what google, apple, or facebook did, they changed the game when they came on the field. Google is an excellent example because the market was saturated with search engines at the time. But at that time search worked very poorly and the dominant strategy of search engines was to become "portal" sites. Google made several "game changing" moves. They created pagerank, which led to better search results. And they used a combination of cutting-edge software techniques (map-reduce, sharded databases) along with cutting-edge datacenter techniques (consumer hardware, massive parallelism, heavy automation). This combination made it possible for google to create a product which was better and superior (more accurate, faster) and cheaper to operate. Which then made it possible for them to monetize their product differently (adwords, etc.) in ways that wouldn't have been possible or profitable for others. The rest is history. Similarly Apple changed the game when it came into competing in the laptop, music player, and phone markets.
ako 13y ago
Apple played a different game: focus on home usage. They created hardware that looked great, so you wouldn't mind having it in the living room, and they supplied a productivity suite that matters for home use: iLife.

by kinkora 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

continuations 13y ago

1) Google - when Google came into existence in late 90's there were no dominant search engines. The orthodoxy at that time was that there was no money in search. Accordingly nobody wanted to be a search engine and everyone tried to be a portal. The dominant player back then - Yahoo - emphasized its use of human editors and partnered with AltaVista and Inktomi for search. So Google never really defeated a dominant search engine - it merely took advantage of a giant vacuum in the market. 2)Apple - Apple never defeated Microsoft in the PC game. Instead it focused on emerging markets: ipod, iphone, ipad. Eventually these new products (smartphones & tablets) became powerful enough to erode the PC market. Even now Microsoft is still dominant in the PC market. It's just that PC is no longer where the action is at. 3)Facebook - there were no dominant players in social networking when facebook was founded. Myspace was the biggest player, but "big" was a relative term back then. Even at the height of its popularity the vast majority of the population was not Myspace users. Sure if you were 16 year old in 2004 then you were probably on Myspace. but outside of that demo Myspace was far from dominant. Most people were not on any social networks. In short it was a wide open market. I'm sure there are examples where a challenger took on a dominant incumbent head on and won. But those are the edge cases. You pretty much need all the stars to align perfectly to have a chance. It's not a strategy I'd bet on.

k__ 13y ago
1) Google > Apple in mobile 2) Apple > Nokia in mobile 3) Facebook > Google in ads
- thedrbrian 13y ago
  What exactly do you mean by google > apple in mobile?
  - k__ 13y ago
    After Apple hit the marked everyone was buying an iPhone. Now most of the people have Android phones.
    - fpgeek 13y ago
      Not really. While the iPhone has been influential and a huge success for Apple, it didn't really kill any of existing smartphone incumbents. "Everyone" was only buying an iPhone for fairly limited values of "everyone" (e.g. excluding several continents). Instead, Android killed off those incumbents, taking advantage of the opening the iPhone had created. So it's really Google > Nokia (Symbian), Microsoft (Windows Mobile), Palm and RIM, with Apple off to the side somewhere. And the complex, multi-faceted Apple vs Google battle in mobile isn't an upstart vs an incumbent, it is a battle of two upstarts who have become the incumbents.
- continuations 13y ago
  1)Apple was never a dominant incumbent in mobile. It focused narrowly on the high end market. For the vast majority of the population, especially in emerging markets like Asia and Africa where Andrioid is now the strongest, iPhone was simply unaffordable. Google didn't fight Apple head on but instead take advantage of its weakness in the mass market and open sourced Android which resulted in a flood of low cost smartphones that quickly capture a large majority of the market, the part of the market where Apple never had much of a presence to begin with. In short, Google played a different game. 2) Nokia rose to power on simple cellphones. It was never a dominant player in smartphones. In fact smartphone was a wide open market with no dominant players when Apple entered that market. So Apple never needed to fight any incumbent. 3) Google still sells 10X more ads than facebook, so it's rather premature to say facebook has beaten google in ads. And even if that does happen eventually, it'd be because facebook avoided fighting google in search ads (unlike Microsoft tried to with Bing) but instead invented the new market of social ads & newsfeed ads. Once again it's the strategy of avoiding fighting the dominant incumbent in its own game and inventing a new game instead.
Poyeyo 13y ago
1) I remember AltaVista to be clearly dominant in the search engine space. Yahoo was not the dominant player in search, and never has been, they were a curated directory of sites.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

I'm not sure whether it was intended or not, regardless, one can take "game" to mean much more than merely "market". If you play by the same rules, same norms, same fundamentals, etc. as hugely entrenched businesses then you'll often fail. But that's not what google, apple, or facebook did, they changed the game when they came on the field. Google is an excellent example because the market was saturated with search engines at the time. But at that time search worked very poorly and the dominant strategy of search engines was to become "portal" sites. Google made several "game changing" moves. They created pagerank, which led to better search results. And they used a combination of cutting-edge software techniques (map-reduce, sharded databases) along with cutting-edge datacenter techniques (consumer hardware, massive parallelism, heavy automation). This combination made it possible for google to create a product which was better and superior (more accurate, faster) and cheaper to operate. Which then made it possible for them to monetize their product differently (adwords, etc.) in ways that wouldn't have been possible or profitable for others. The rest is history. Similarly Apple changed the game when it came into competing in the laptop, music player, and phone markets.

ako 13y ago

Apple played a different game: focus on home usage. They created hardware that looked great, so you wouldn't mind having it in the living room, and they supplied a productivity suite that matters for home use: iLife.