I don’t know what the hell they teach people in business management schools but they sure don’t think like normal people… it’s like they are programmed with the Sierra club’s “limits to growth” report hardwired in.

Microsoft, telco’s, the record industry, traditional airlines … they are all concerned to the effective exclusion of all else on controlling “market share”, never growing the market or building new ones.

And yet, low cost airlines, the home computer industry when it started, cell phones when they started, Internet service … all these when they had their great success and growth was when they didn’t worry much about market share, and instead developed and provided new services to new customers.

Remember Bill Gate’s “no one will ever need more than 640k” comment? If you build it, someone will figure out a way to use it … and you can charge them for using it.

Sooner or later, if you turn your back on the new and just try to monopolize the old as a business you will have signed your death warrant. It may take 50 years like it did for the “recording industry” but sooner or later something new will come along and blow you out of the water.

Anyone remember what AT&T stands for? How much of their business is sending telegraphs anymore? Can you imagine that they would be around today if 100 years ago some MBA decided they should concentrate on market share of the telegraph market and ignore that Telephone thing?

Indeed, in some places the same tactics were tried to stifle the growth of phones… we all can see how well that worked.

I remember not all that long ago ( 35 years ) when none of my relatives in england actually had a phone … they couldn’t afford the license fees. Nor did they have cable TV till recently. They had TV’s they had to pay a fee to own and post office trucks drove down the streets with detector equipment looking for illegal sets. It was all rather quaint and backward. Cell phone growth and internet penetration in Canada has already stalled. If North American companies really want to be as quaint and backwards as the UK was in 30 years, and be swept away when the chinese, indian and european multinationals of the day swoop in to modernize us, as our companies did to the UK, just keep on ignoring innovation and focus on market share. Because as every MBA seems to know, the most important thing is total control of an obsolete and extinct market.