I liked the article talking about Apple's strategy but I guess I'm having trouble following it. The author appears to spend a lot of time cracking on companies that cling to the Porter model (like Blockbuster) but then the final paragraph is:

Why do I love Apple, despite all peer pressure and conventional wisdom? They understand that superior products kill three porter birds with one stone. They eliminate substitutes, increase development costs (and therefore reduce new entry threats) and decrease supplier power. Locking consumers into a closed system only gets you one, and pisses your revenue source off at the same time.

Soooooooo, Apple is exploiting the tenents of Porter's model to their fullest? I also find it deliciously ironic that the author praises Apple while defaming companies who would dare to try locking consumers into one hardware path/distribution model to the exclusion of others... if you asked me blindly to identify the company most affiliated with that description I would not have hesitated to say Apple.  

posted by natedogg at 12:16AM CST on May 02

I love learning about the "clearly stated, universally accepted, accessible idea from a field quite different from your own, that you have never heard of". So here is Porter's "Five Forces" "Death by Harry Potter",a cultural analysis of business strategy in a competitive marketplace. Now what lead me to this is an article attacking the orthodoxy but either way I found both worth reading.  

posted by zieglerfe at 03:53PM CST on May 16