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Tech World: How to Outrun Competition and Win Target Market
This article is going to talk about how to beat any vendor that is overriding a particular market. There is always a way to beat a dominating seller, but it’s definitely not by chasing that seller from the back – unless you are willing to spend your last buck in trashing the seller. Apple certainly did not beat Microsoft by trying to create a better PC and neither Sun nor Microsoft beat IBM by trying to develop a better mainframe.
There is only one route to beating a seller at what he’s good at – That is by being the first to reach where that particular seller is going or by doing something that the seller is not willing to do for the focal market. The funny part however is that company’s still feel that they can actually outrun giants like Apple, Microsoft or IBM by chasing – These companies fail in an epic fashion but there metal is unbent.
Why Chasing Almost Never Works
Remember Apple had tried to build a better laptop or desktop in the ‘90s? Rivaling Windows / DOS specifications, but its hardware never sold. Even though its hardware was very fast, it made the mistake of trying to chase Microsoft and honestly never won the battle. Apple had fast laptop and desktop but it was always a step behind Microsoft and Intel. It was chasing so it could never step on the same platform where Microsoft stood, Microsoft was always the first to reach the target market.
Doing What Others Aren’t Willing to Do
This reminds me of the iPod story - The epic battle between Sony and Apple. Sony had always been able to dominate the market with its Walkman because it already held a lot of media – But Sony never thought about what the people wanted. People wanted ripping to be easy – Ripping being the process of extracting music from a CD and making it readily available to be played on a digital player. As a result, even though Sony made far better looking and smarter MP3 players than Apple in those days, they were rendered almost useless. Getting music on a Sony Walkman became seeming impossible and once you got the music, navigating was like a headache.
Apple on the other hand played the smart card well and won the race by doing what Sony was not willing to do. Sony never gave light to ripping, while Apple tried to make its iPods easy to use. This is what the market always wanted. Apple simply stole the market from Sony simply by using a business form of martial art to annihilate Sony out of its own dominant territory.
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