15 Years Providing Weekly Foresight

 

The most accurate predictive letter in computing and telecommunications,
read by industry leaders worldwide.

 

 

 

In This Issue     Feature: Having It All Niching It Moving from Competition to Desire Account Control with High Margins vs. Being Everything with No Margins Having It All in Consumer   Quotes of the Week   Upgrades Parasitism vs. Global Growth Flipping Proton Spins HTC: "Hi Tech Corporation": Yeah, But Whose IP Is It?   Ethermail   Takeout Window Flipping Proton Spins The New Cisco Cius Tablet SNS Opportunities and Licenses   Upcoming SNS Events & Media Links   In Other House News New Members' Welcome SNS Positions Open How to Subscribe May I Share This Newsletter? About SNS About the Publisher Where's Mark?

 

To hear Mark's latest interview for the BBC, with host Peter Day, please visit:

 

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hnkyq#synopsis

 

 

Having It All

 

 

» Niching It

 

In the early days of the personal computer software industry, there were all kinds of products that, it turned out later, were destined to be features. Spell-checkers, dictionaries, whole bags of utilities of things that got left out of the last operating-system release these niched offerings not only powered companies, until they were subsumed or digested, but they also provided a broad diversity of company sizes and types.

 

My favorite from that era was a standalone utility called Sideways that let one print yep sideways. Today, that would be the "landscape" button on the submenu for print options.

 

As John Chambers might later have put it: all of these were parts of a larger ecosystem.