Re: Laser 128 - questions...

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Roy replied:

>Michael J. Mahon wrote:

<snip>

>> I used to work for a major company that made about a half dozen
>> "improved" PCs--all market flops, of course.  The improvements were
>> very promising, but the software support for them was non-existent
>> outside the ports that the company paid for.
>
>TI Professional, Digital, and Tandy 2000.
>Same basic deal. Oh! IBM PCjr.

I used to wonder what our executives were thinking!  It was
obvious to me and many others that the critical mass
phenomenon was in full bloom, and no "similar but better"
machine could ever win in the marketplace.

This kind of unconscious incompetence is actually the most
common state of large management teams.  They remain
unconcious until they are forceably awakened by pain or until
they are removed from the playing field by natural selection.

There seem to be many people who regret the dominance of
a single computing platform, and many of them blame the
creators of the winning platform for winning.

It is not unusual for the marketplace winners to be
hypercompetitive.  Consider puppies:  we think it is cute and
"spunky" when a small dog displays aggressive behavior.
When a dog gets larger and continues to exhibit noisy
aggression, we think of it as annoying or even dangerous.
But it is the same aggressive competitive trait that was in
the "cute" puppy.

We like all of our hypercompetitive "puppy" companies
that achieve success to tone down their competition so that
they are less threatening.  But if they succeed quickly, and
are able to preserve their "startup" culture, they are less
likely to "mellow" as older companies invariably do.

The truth is that the market decides the winners, and we have
exactly the computing milieu that we have collectively chosen
for ourselves.  Dissatisfaction with the consensus platform is
actually dissatisfaction with the market itself, not the suppliers
of the platform, who, after all, are only giving the market what it
chooses with its collective pocketbook.  And some continue to
exhibit that "gotta win" attitude that made them successful in
the first place--which we find unacceptable in a "big dog".

-michael

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