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Blogvent Day 3 - Three Industry Giants

Business | Technology

2011 should be an interesting year on the battle for supremacy in the technology space. There is a strong argument that there are three key players in town and they are all starting to tread on each others toes after years of eyeing each other up. Apple, Google and Microsoft are the 800lb gorillas, but the question remains, is there room for all three in the minds of consumers and investors alike as these companies start to eat each others lunch?

While markets often support a leader and a challenger at the top, with a group of followers below, a triumvirate vying for the same space generally produces some excitement. Classic marketing theory suggests that three into two just does not go. Take the veteran golfers Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player and the battles for majors that they delivered to eager followers. But in more mundane or traditionally competitive areas, Coke and Pepsi as leaders and challengers are still not overly bothered about Red Bull and Monster. In the antivirus software market, Intel shook up the field this year by acquiring the clear number two, McAfee. That left a clear gap between industry behemoth Symantec and the distant challengers Kaspersky, Trend Micro and Sophos which will take some work to fill.

In b2b technology there has been tremendous consolidation recently as well as some strategic moves which have started to threaten the status quo. Moves like HP’s acquisition of Palm could be an attempt to get into the same game along side the big three. Oracle bought Sun, so now competes with HP, while perhaps in retaliation to Cisco’s move into computing, HP also bought 3Com to strengthen its network offering. Although EMC is also a major player here, this b2b space is so segmented and diverse there is room for several alpha males as they all can all claim to be king of their own patch despite certain overlaps.

But back to the big three, they are all starting to aim to the same not just overlapping markets which must surely end with some winners and losers. All three will soon be competing in one form or another in mobile, operating systems, applications, cloud, browsers, content including photos, music and video, and perhaps even search. It will be fascinating to see how the strategy of each unfolds and how markets in terms of investors and consumers react.

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