On Mar 13, 10:44 am, Jonah Thomas <jethom...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> So, Forth tends to get an in when it's first-to-market. How many of the
> niches that Forth has had a fighting chance have been that way? Most of
> them? One exception is OF, where MicroSoft had a Plug and Play advantage
> and various competitors saw a chance to get leverage -- they could have
> a cross-OS, cross-processor approach to get plug-ins that would run on
> everything but PCs. But for one reason or another the coalition broke
> down. Did they start out with the assumption they'd get economy of scale
> with multiple vendors, and each one that dropped out made it less
> attractive for the others? Were there problems with x86 systems that
> made it not work for them? Was there some inflexibility in OF that made
> vendors choose proprietary replacements? Did the components vendors fail
> to go along and so there weren't enough third-party participants to keep
> the momentum? I don't know why OF was abandoned.
I only have the one piece of actual direct evidence from that, but it
suggests that it was trying to establish a duopoly into a setting that
is a natural monopoly with competitive fringe.
The OF strategy is what is called the "United Front" strategy when the
innovation is political revolution (where successful examples are a
damn sight rarer than technological revolutions).
****fting to the industrial landscape, where it is seen quite a lot,
you have a going concern with such substantial monopoly power that all
that's left is little odds and ends of market niches. So the local
powers inside those little odds and ends agree to unit as a coalition,
and hope to gain network economies and economies of scope.
1. It works so well that they gain an advantage in terms of network
economies and economies of scope over the in***bent. Think VHS over
Betamax, where the firm best placed to establish a standard videotape
format lost out in the mass consumer marketplace to a coalition. A
critical advantage of the coalition over Sony was that Sony had to
design a product line where one product did not cannibalize the most
similar fellow products, while the members of the VHS coalition were
of course only agreeing on the VHS standard and were otherwise
perfectly happy to try to cannibalize the market shares of products of
fellow consortium members ... so when the main use was recording from
air, VHS was always ahead in the features race, so it had the largest
market share when the video rental store explosion took off. Sony was
left mainly with the market on the other side of the broadcast tower,
where its technical advantages ruled the roost.
2. It works, but does not supplant the in***bent. You become "Avis" to
the in***bent "Herz", "Pepsi" to the in***bent "Coke".
3. It doesn't work ... the coalition does not reach a threshold level
of network economies (economies of how many people are in the common
communication domain) or economies of scope (economies of the variety
of different objectives that may be pursued with a given technological
base) to make it worthwhile to continue sacrificing individual
competitive advantages against the other going concerns in the
competitive fringe.
The prospect of maybe being part of a united front coalition that does
(1) is one thing that helps keep a united front coalition together,
but it would not seem very plausible that the OF coalition could
supplant Microsoft. Anyone with the desktop as a main target market
would make a device driver for Microsoft first, and then think about
whether to add something else. The best that the OF coalition could
really hope for was (2).
And there they face the problem of Microsoft forcing the market ...
the strategy of constantly pu****ng feature bloat out into new versions
of its operating system accompanied by new versions of its dominant
office suite, so that instead of those hardware makers turning to the
task of "what else do we sup****t", the next task was quite often, "how
do we cope with this new stuff Microsoft is throwing at us?"
Which gets to the only actual observation I have from that particular
case. While looking around at one of the efforts to provide OF device
driver development services, I saw an interesting strategy, which was
development of an ability to compress the Microsoft plug and play
device driver code ... I think this is PCI, but I'm not sure ... to
make room for the OF plug and play device driver.
The account on the site was that this particular tool was popular ...
but what it was used for was to build a bigger Microsoft plug and play
device driver.
So in that particular case at least, "sup****t for more systems" lost
out to "more sup****t for Microsoft systems".
There's always a threshold for a united front kind of strategy where
the members are chasing network economies and economies of scope that
they can't get individually ... if the coalition falls short of the
threshold, then the rivalry inside the coalition is a stronger force
than the benefits of member****p, and the coalition falls apart.
What would likely have been needed would be substantial network
economics or economies of scope for a group within the coalition that
was in a coherent cluster of market niches beyond the reach of the
Microsoft system ... and then those competing for a better position in
market niches under the influence of Microsoft would be able to
benefit from hardware targeting that neighboring market.
So at present, except for the scenario where the hardware platform is
having software written for it to target it ... the OLPC scenario ...
that's Linux, where there are going concerns developing device drivers
that cannot be driven out of business by starving them of commercial
income, because they are not relying on commercial income as their
means of remaining viable as a going concern.
For for example, Palm abandoning their proprietary system for a Linux-
based one because otherwise they cannot take their PDA's and
smartphones into the space of USB hosts where they need to be able to
go ... if they try to develop all the USB host drivers from scratch
for a proprietary platform, they will never be able to get there.
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