I must apologize... 10090

Well, Buford, all I can say is that you are not a marketing genius or even a student who pbutted the introductory courses in product management. If you only want to think of the next move, you might come to the conclusion that you outlined below and think that you could obtain some incremental business from the group of prospective customers who might want to purchase a dual-boot computer as opposed to a single OS preference. You would only come to even this much, BTW, if you could show that there was some kind of preference that outweighed any negative view from broader segments.

But you have to think of what your compebreastor might do in response to your move, Buford, and that is almost always an initial buttumption that the compebreastion will meet your move with a duplication. If what you are doing is easily duplicated, you gain no advantage and only suffer the costs of the change, damaging both you and your compebreastion. Professionals in marketing understand this and don't make silly moves like that.

It is not a case of a monopolist being the only kind of company able to see the market dynamics, Buford. Rather you offer your premise because you don't understand them from a supplier viewpoint. You are looking at a simplified Consumer Debt POV that hopes that prices will decline and-or functions will increase. But you don't even analyze your own responses.

Well, Burford, you buttume facts not in evidence and so project a defective scenario. I am thinking in terms of entire markets and it is always the right way to think. More precisely, I am thinking in terms of market segments, though. A segment being the range where you are trying to sell a product. When you do that, you can easily see that there is no reason why you should not be in a segment that you do not monopolize or have some sure-fire plan to monopolize. Apple, for example, monopolizes its own market segment and targets a very specific group of customers that, as you can see from comments made by Apple fans, not likely to consider Wintel machines for any purchase. The only problem that Apple has is that their segment is small.

But if your plan is to provide the best product to your market and you can do that, you will easily obtain all the business available in that segment as soon as you manage to contact all the consumers in that segment. After all, who is going to buy something inferior once they understand the issues?

As to compebreastion, it really doesn't exist in that sort of framework. If some other company has a better product than yours, you are doomed and need to re-think your business purpose. If the other company is simply better addressing some market segments that you were not targeting but where consumers found your product more attractive than others even though none were designed for the purpose, you can write that segment off, since you were not pursuing it to begin with or you can design a product even better than the other company's product and go about targeting the segment directly.

In general, though, you do not want to target segments that have existing satisfactory service available. It is much more rewarding financially to find new markets where your products are immediately recognized as useful and desirable. A view of market compebreastion as a situation where a number of vendors are beating each other up on price is childish and not very useful in running a successful business.