Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!

“To take over a market, you have to address every barrier to
entry. If you forget just one barrier which trips up 50% of your
potential customers, then by definition, you can’t have more than
50% market share, and you will never displace the dominant player,
and you’ll be stuck on the sad (omelet) side of chicken and egg
problems.

“This was published in 2000, and it is just as The trouble is
that most managers only think about strategy one step at a time,
like chess players who refuse to think one move ahead. Most of them
will say, “it’s important to let people convert into your product,
but why should I waste my limited engineering budget letting people
convert out?”

“That’s a childish approach to strategy. It reminds me of
independent booksellers, who said “why should I make it comfortable
for people to read books in my store? I want them to buy the
books!” And then one day Barnes and Nobles puts couches and cafes
in the stores and practically begged people to read books in their
store without buying them. Now you’ve got all these customers
sitting in their stores for hours at a time, mittengrabben all the
books with their filthy hands, and the probability that they find
something they want to buy is linearly proportional to the amount
of time they spend in the store, and even the dinkiest Barnes and
Nobles superstore in Iowa City rakes in hundreds of dollars a
minute while the independent booksellers are going out of
business.”
This was published in 2000, and it is just as pertinent as
ever– this explains why ‘free’ and ‘better’ are not quite enough
to effectively market Linux– ed.

Complete
Story