The Competitive Re-Alignment of Every Industry is Coming
Note from John: I’ve been on a break from writing on Medium for a bit, but here’s some thing short that I put together this afternoon. Enjoy!
It used to be that if you produce oil, you competed against other oil companies. If you make movies, you compete against other movie producers. If you make phones, you compete against other phone users.
This alignment bent quite a bit after World War II as companies began to diversify, especially into related fields. It snapped back to attention with the Internet era as smaller players could reach larger consumer segments and thus get around traditional players in some industries (e.g. entertainment) but not others (e.g. “heavy” manufacturing).
In some ways, this is true. For instance, if I run a company that depends on a certain type of employee — a video editor, for instance — I am competing for that talent with other companies who could employ her.
But competitive alignment in the tech industry is not just about competition for talent — it is also rather obviously about competition for consumers. And in that, companies are less (and more alike) than you might expect. This alignment is largely related to the attention paid by consumer segments, not by what the company actually does.
