Grow by shrinking a market. For every dollar of revenue Microsoft made, it took away six dollars of revenue from their competitors. Every dollar of Microsoft’s gain caused an asymmetrical amount of pain in the marketplace. They made money by shrinking the market.
The Economist on Business Continuity Planning. The effect on Ericsson, a Swedish mobile-phone company, of a fire in a New Mexico chipmaking plant belonging to the Dutch firm Philips, has become a legend. The fire, in March 2000, started by a bolt of lightning, lasted less than 10 minutes, but it caused havoc to the super-clean environment that chipmaking requires. Ericsson, unable to find an alternative source of supply, went on to report a loss of over $2 billion in its mobile-phone division that year, a loss that left it as an also-ran in an industry where it had once been a leader. ...
China, which anyway has the largest mobile user base, has now beaten Japan to the second largest PC and Web base in the world. Wonder how they do it.
AOL, and hence its 30 million subscribers, could move away from IE towards Mozilla. That’s big.
The latest browser stats say that 69% of the world uses, Internet Explorer, while only 27% use Netscape. BrowserWatch says 57%-26%. Netscape 6 might do something about it, given that Microsoft’s split.