Last week I was asked about my opinion about Porters Generic Strategies during the current financial crisis. My first spontaneous thought was: Why ask that question? Is it less important to have a distinctive strategy during a crisis than it is during a boom? I think the contrary is true. However, my discussion partner expected [...]

DVD business is one the biggest profit makers in Hollywood. Taking this issue into consideration it easy to see why movie makers of the big media companies (e.g. Time Warner, News Corp., and NBC Universal) can be very happy now. The long term “format war” between blu-ray and HD DVD has come to an end. [...]

In a competitive and dynamic environment it is crucial to stay ahead of your competitors. To achieve this position your organization has to focus on certain aspects like innovation, quality leadership and branding to create some kind of advantage. If your competitive advantage is established primarily on technology and innovation, patents seem to be an [...]

A couple of days ago I received a question concerning an external growth strategy. The core of that question had three different parts. When might this strategy route be appropriate?  What are the conditions for an organization to consider this route and what forms of strategies are applicable once the organization settles to take this [...]

I made a quick and dirty competitor benchmarking today in the office. This was a spontaneous idea when I worked on the profile of one of my company’s competitors. When doing this I realised how many buzzwords this company used to describe how great it is and why customers should do business with this company [...]

Naseem Javed, global authority on naming and branding, has submitted a very interesting piece of thought about Global Copycats to our Management Portal. Naseem directs our attention to a phenomenon that is so widespread and commonplace these days, that we hardly notice it and surely don’t think about it very much – the stealing and [...]

In the past we had a brief look at Youtube and the web 2.0 business (see this posts). But these news are quite amazing. According to GOLEM, a German IT website, Youtube plans to establish a revenue system for “video uploaders”. So far, payment scheme and security issues are not solved. Youtube CEO Chad Hurley [...]