

Tech Leaders Don't Win By Saying They'll Crush Somebody - waleedka
http://blog.louisgray.com/2011/06/tech-leaders-dont-win-by-saying-theyll.html

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gaius
Larry Ellison is only in it for the crushing, I don't think he even cares
about money anymore

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hoodoof
Wow this article couldn't be further from the truth. I can only assume the
author was not in the industry during the 1980's and 1990's watching the
vicious stomping that Microsoft dealt out to every company that got in its
way. And they didn't do it quietly either.

Nor was Oracle or Sun Microsystems shy and retiring when it came to publicly
lashing their competition.

The fundamental premise of this article is that technology companies have got
to the top by being great and nice and executing well and doing it politely
is, well, rubbish.

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louismg
Microsoft acted like a spoiled monopolist who aggressively guarded their turf
throughout the 80s and 90s. Absolutely. They wanted a PC on every desktop in
every home running Microsoft software. All absolutely true.

But did they make this noise from a challenger position, which is the case for
all the examples I cited? No. They acted like a big gorilla from the top.

Oracle too is crazy aggressive. In one of the books I mentioned, but not by
name, is "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison is that God Doesn't
Think He Is Larry Ellison." Fantastic book. Go read it.

It is absolutely possible to find exceptions. There are few absolutes. But I
do believe that challengers to #1 who publicly make #1 the target rarely
succeed. This is true. It's not "couldn't be further from the truth" because
of a few examples.

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hoodoof
Were you in the computer industry during the 80's and 90's?

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louismg
My bio and resume are on the site. I am sure you would interpret it different
than would I.

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thaumaturgy
I mean absolutely no disrespect to you here, but it's remarkably poor
judgement to cite your bio and resume on this site in particular. While you
were attending school, I was writing a variable interpolaters in COBOL (a
language without strings) -- and I would usually never mention that here,
because someone's going to show up that makes me look like the amateur that I
am. Your experience is also very heavy in the marketing field, which makes it
reasonable to conclude that you might not have had to deal directly with the
effects of the business tactics that the giants used (and are still using).
Quite a large number of people here, on the other hand, have a much more
personal memory of the ruthlessness of the I.T. field. You are Stef Murky,
speaking to a rather large crowd of Gregs and Pitrs.

That said: I read your post as though you were making a larger point that it's
a strategic business error to focus on "taking down" a competitor, and that's
probably usually true, and a good thing to remind people sometimes.

Unfortunately for the rest of the content of your post, it somewhat misses
that Apple was referring to IBM in their 1984 commercial; that Apple was
publicly mocking Microsoft in the early 90s before a lawsuit made them
cooperate, at last, by bringing Office to the Mac; or, for more recent
examples, that Google is working hard to depose Apple in the smartphone market
or that Apple has its sights set on Amazon with their cloud offerings or ...

It's generally a good idea to focus on your product or service, not your
competitor, but pointing to big, successful I.T. companies is not the way to
make that point.

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tgrisfal
* Find a wildly successful product

* Find a subset of its users which are less satisfied

* Build the version they want

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mbesto
Meta - why doesn't anyone mention SAP in the sentence of world's tech leaders?

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hoodoof
It's a big company but not so exciting. Perhaps that's why.

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mbesto
It has nothing to do with excitement. How is the largest business software
company in the world not considered a tech leader?

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hoodoof
SAP is considered a tech leader, just not one interesting enough to mention
alongside all the other tech leaders. I fear Microsoft is headed the same way.

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aneth
Someone tell Steve Ballmer. Before he gets fired.

