thirty-eightSTRATEGY LETTER III:LET ME GO BACK!
SATURDAY, JUNE 3, 2000
When you're trying to get people to switch from a competitor to your product, you need to understand barriers to entry, and you need to understand them a lot better than you think, or people won't switch, and you'll be waiting tables.
A couple of chapters back, I wrote about the difference between two kinds of companies: the Ben & Jerry's kind of company that is trying to take over from established competition, versus the Amazon.com kind of company that is trying a "land grab" in a new field where there is no established competition. When I worked on Excel in the early 1990s, Microsoft was a card-carrying member of the Ben & Jerry's camp. Lotus 123, the established competitor, ...
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