Likely Success of Internet-Related Business Models?

guess-for-success asks: "In Lester Thurow's latest book, published by HarperBusiness Books (Fall 2003), Fortune Favors the Bold: What We Must Do to Build a New and Lasting Global Prosperity, there is a chapter which discusses the beginning of new industries. During this time, several business models are introduced and only a few will survive. Looking at the PC industry, Commodore was the industry leader in the 1980's, but ultimately failed and went bankrupt in 1994. Successful business models such as Dell were not introduced until years after the industry began. I now ask the Slashdot community: which internet business models they believe are going to succeed? Which companies will rise to the top? Will they be infrastructure related companies such as Cisco and even FedEx, or will they be true dot.com's such as eBay or Amazon?"

"You can find out more about Lester Thurow here. He is a professor of economics and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been the Dean of the Sloan School of Business at MIT. He has three New York Times best selling books to his credit and consults widely around the globe."

Comments

Blown away, already? We need a local cache!!!

[no_such_user]

*Already* this site is /.'ed beyond usability. It's too much. Slashdot needs to provide a local cache of pages it links to, for all non-major league sites. To not do so is irresponsible - and makes the point of posting the links at all pretty much moot.

Google has the right idea

[Anonymous Coward]

You do one thing (in their case) and you do it well. Then you use that one thing to make money.

Re:Google has the right idea

[squiggleslash]

Google doesn't stand still. They keep adding to the service, what they don't do is screw with the core product.

I find it interesting that Commodore is given as an example of a failure. Commodore had ups and downs throughout the eighties, going into Chapter 11 on at least one occasion. For the most part, it was merely managed badly and once Commodore was able to get the Amiga on track, it did very well.

Where it went wrong was, ironically, in thinking that it needed to ape Dell. During the late eighties and early nineties, it came out with a series of Commodore-branded PCs, believing that it needed to keep an oar in that market in case the Amiga golden-goose stopped laying its eggs. This was disasterous for a couple of reasons: Amiga development revenues were diverted to PC development which meant the Amiga slowly became less revolutionary compared to what else was in the market, and the PC industry was already a commodity market - you couldn't make money there unless you were very lucky and Commodore was further hampered in that respect by having a name that didn't play well with traditionally conservative PC buyers.

Had Commodore avoided that kind of diversification, they probably would be around today. The Amiga would probably not be their base product (though, like the Mac, the name may have stayed for products that do not resemble the original in any respect), but the fact that it had a good name, was a "different choice" that would have attracted people who do not want Windows, and would have ensured Commodore had control over their own platform, would have meant the product would have had substantial reason to succeed.

Never underestimate the power of bad management decisions to kill a good business model.

Re:trusted computing

[bhtooefr]

Trusted computing gives control of YOUR computer to the company that made the software or hardware. It means that the company can trust the computer. You can't trust a TC computer.