February 14, 2010
Dear Fellow Strategists,
Happy New Year and Happy Valentine's Day. Will
it be a good idea for Mr. Coffee to sell a BIG BIG BIG coffee mug along
with its steam espresso machine? You see the machine is darn good, but
I can only use half a mug of of milk to steam it up to the brim. So I
end up making espresso twice or thrice in one hour when I am in the
mood to drink capuchino. If I had a bigger coffee cup, I could have
saved all these days between Happy New Year and Sweet Valentine's Day
by making my GRANDE CAPUCHINO in one shot!
Now,
that was more than a joke. Selling complements is a great idea. Using
complements is a greater idea still, and check our latest strategy
nugget on Technology Platforms in our Tech Strategy
section, where you will learn how Facebook and iPhone leverage
complements by using the strategy of building not just a product, but a
platform...
So lets talk some more strategy, as in product strategy, or better still, technology strategy...
Dominant Designs and Technology Cycles
When a new technology product succeeds in the market place, the technology underneath goes through a cycle, as depicted below. If you have read my articles on S-Curves, you can appreciate terms like "Ferment" and "Maturity" in the boxes below.
What might intrigue you, and what the holy grail of product marketing truly is, is this concept called "Dominant Design." If the recently announced iPad from Apple is not a dominant design in its category, what is? So what exactly is a "Dominant Design?" What is the dominant design in Internet Search? Is i-Phone the dominant design amongst smart phones? What is a technology cycle? Why is a Business Model unproven until the dominant design emerges? Listen to my podcast to learn more...
Enjoy Your Valentine!
Sam Mishra, Author, Strategic Case Analysis
PS: We now have a plethora of concepts, frameworks, and formulae in the form of podcasts which you can enjoy right away. As the economy grudgingly recovers, the focus on this edition of this Open Strategy Portal is on Technology Strategy. So, enjoy the following tech strategy related podcasts ---
S-Curves : How Franteractive President Sam Mishra had used these to alert Sun Microsystem's CEO Scott McNealy that Linux was going to kill Solaris (Sun is no more an independent company; today it is an Oracle Business Unit...
Value Chain Analysis: How to Create, Deliver, and Capture Value from Software Manufacturing
TALC: TALC or Technology Adoption Life Cycle, including the "CHASM" between "early adopters" and "early majority"
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