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He explicitly excludes monopolies, like TW and Comcast.
by lwf 13y ago
He explicitly excludes monopolies, like TW and Comcast.
- dmazin 13y agoThis comment needs to be stressed. Altman's article simply doesn't make it clear enough that he's excluding companies such as Time Warner. Military contractors are a whole other issue, of course.
- gk1 13y agoA more realistic title, "Here's One of Many Ways a Some Companies can Grow, or Not", probably wouldn't have made the front page. This is a few paragraphs mentioning a fairly obvious point about growing companies, but trying too hard to seem groundbreaking.
- bananacurve 13y agoYou cannot become a monopoly without having a better product at one point, unless you are friends with a dictator.
- dredmorbius 13y agoOr you can take the route of Standard Oil: negotiate special rates with railroads (through rebates, a process later made illegal), force out your competition, and where that failed, literally blow them up. Microsoft got itself lucky with an exclusive licensing arrangement then played that hand for all it was worth. Court documents largely from the Novell lawsuit (though there were numerous others) reveal just how cut-throat the company was. In general, finding some initial advantage and leveraging it is what has tended to work. Government contract, sweetheart deal with an existing major player (Google's search deal with Yahoo early on, for example), patents, strategic lawsuits, FUD, and others. Altman's premise really doesn't hold water.