Wow this article couldn't be further from the truth. I can only assume the author was not in the industry during the 1980's and 1990's watching the vicious stomping that Microsoft dealt out to every company that got in its way. And they didn't do it quietly either.
Nor was Oracle or Sun Microsystems shy and retiring when it came to publicly lashing their competition.
The fundamental premise of this article is that technology companies have got to the top by being great and nice and executing well and doing it politely is, well, rubbish.
Microsoft acted like a spoiled monopolist who aggressively guarded their turf throughout the 80s and 90s. Absolutely. They wanted a PC on every desktop in every home running Microsoft software. All absolutely true.
But did they make this noise from a challenger position, which is the case for all the examples I cited? No. They acted like a big gorilla from the top.
Oracle too is crazy aggressive. In one of the books I mentioned, but not by name, is "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison is that God Doesn't Think He Is Larry Ellison." Fantastic book. Go read it.
It is absolutely possible to find exceptions. There are few absolutes. But I do believe that challengers to #1 who publicly make #1 the target rarely succeed. This is true. It's not "couldn't be further from the truth" because of a few examples.
I mean absolutely no disrespect to you here, but it's remarkably poor judgement to cite your bio and resume on this site in particular. While you were attending school, I was writing a variable interpolaters in COBOL (a language without strings) -- and I would usually never mention that here, because someone's going to show up that makes me look like the amateur that I am. Your experience is also very heavy in the marketing field, which makes it reasonable to conclude that you might not have had to deal directly with the effects of the business tactics that the giants used (and are still using). Quite a large number of people here, on the other hand, have a much more personal memory of the ruthlessness of the I.T. field. You are Stef Murky, speaking to a rather large crowd of Gregs and Pitrs.
That said: I read your post as though you were making a larger point that it's a strategic business error to focus on "taking down" a competitor, and that's probably usually true, and a good thing to remind people sometimes.
Unfortunately for the rest of the content of your post, it somewhat misses that Apple was referring to IBM in their 1984 commercial; that Apple was publicly mocking Microsoft in the early 90s before a lawsuit made them cooperate, at last, by bringing Office to the Mac; or, for more recent examples, that Google is working hard to depose Apple in the smartphone market or that Apple has its sights set on Amazon with their cloud offerings or ...
It's generally a good idea to focus on your product or service, not your competitor, but pointing to big, successful I.T. companies is not the way to make that point.
Microsoft was a huge underdog in many areas, namely to Novell and Wordperfect. Later in the 90s they tried to break into enterprise software, and were largely laughed at, having little credibility in the space. Today, they make billions on Windows Server, SQL Server and Exchange.
I believe you might've missed the point. The way to succeed is to set a higher goal and a bigger vision than your competition, not to make it your goal to destroy them.
SAP is considered a tech leader, just not one interesting enough to mention alongside all the other tech leaders. I fear Microsoft is headed the same way.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 48.0 ms ] threadNor was Oracle or Sun Microsystems shy and retiring when it came to publicly lashing their competition.
The fundamental premise of this article is that technology companies have got to the top by being great and nice and executing well and doing it politely is, well, rubbish.
But did they make this noise from a challenger position, which is the case for all the examples I cited? No. They acted like a big gorilla from the top.
Oracle too is crazy aggressive. In one of the books I mentioned, but not by name, is "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison is that God Doesn't Think He Is Larry Ellison." Fantastic book. Go read it.
It is absolutely possible to find exceptions. There are few absolutes. But I do believe that challengers to #1 who publicly make #1 the target rarely succeed. This is true. It's not "couldn't be further from the truth" because of a few examples.
That said: I read your post as though you were making a larger point that it's a strategic business error to focus on "taking down" a competitor, and that's probably usually true, and a good thing to remind people sometimes.
Unfortunately for the rest of the content of your post, it somewhat misses that Apple was referring to IBM in their 1984 commercial; that Apple was publicly mocking Microsoft in the early 90s before a lawsuit made them cooperate, at last, by bringing Office to the Mac; or, for more recent examples, that Google is working hard to depose Apple in the smartphone market or that Apple has its sights set on Amazon with their cloud offerings or ...
It's generally a good idea to focus on your product or service, not your competitor, but pointing to big, successful I.T. companies is not the way to make that point.
* Find a subset of its users which are less satisfied
* Build the version they want