Competition never sleeps

Summary : It is a basic principle of tactical awareness that the competition never sleeps. You must assume that they are always trying to find areas of competitive advantage and working to reverse any areas of competitive disadvantage. During the eighties, the ascent of Japan's semiconductor equipment industry was accompanied by high customer satisfaction with their tools and general dissatisfaction with tools made by western suppliers...

Click here to view full screen

Intel’s Branding Strate ...

One of the most important Maxims of Hi-Tech is to never confuse customers with names. This is something Intel regularly does with its open code naming of technologies, obtuse names like Montevina. It is intenti ... See more

Needs and benefits alwa ...

15 Jun 1985

This jewel is one of the most important lessons I remember from Bob Graham. The setting was at an off-site meeting in Monterey during the mid-eighties. Applied Materials was working on its next block-buster: ... See more

IBM’s Design For Manufa ...

15 Jun 2007

Why does IBM have a semiconductor group when the biggest advancements in computing power are coming from architectural innovation these days and the lighting to the end of the Moore’s Law Tunnel keeps getting d ... See more

Strategic versus tactic ...

Confusing the two is a dangerous mistake. Not understanding the difference typically leads to tactics with no strategy. Tactics will then often conflict with the implicit strategy. Yet, these are very common ... See more

Narratives – not earnin ...

It is a strategic error to focus too closely on the more predictable control of quarterly earnings results, while providing a stale narrative for where future earnings growth will come from. Earnings are just t ... See more

Tech Business Strategy ...

Most confuse the two and in reality I doubt there is any formal definition for marketing. In military circles the definition is clear... I believe that this definition works well for business with some modific ... See more

Tunneling through a com ...

Tunneling through a competitor’s pricing walls is a very effective strategy. AMD successfully used this to gain share in the microprocessor market. It starts with carefully examining the existing market struc ... See more

Advertising in Tech: wh ...

15 Jun 2005

Advertising should be primarily used for imprinting your brand on the minds of senior executives and investors ... See more

True Visionary’s go whe ...

Almost every company wants to be as innovative as Apple and have their own Steve Jobs driving product development. Sadly there is almost always a Steve Jobs in every company. The problem is that few companies a ... See more

Branding word choice wi ...

Words matter. Words imprint in the brain with the images they create. It is a general observation the best brands are built around words descriptive of the products, markets, or the companies they are destined ... See more