sheehan alam

An Informal Case Study: Don’t Fight The Market

You cannot beat the market. Whether you’re an investor or an entreprenuer the market dictates where money is flowing. Follow the money. Find it, ride it, and get off. Here are some companies that are fighting the market, and getting trounced.

• RIAA continues to believe in CD’s instead of MP3 and P2P sharing
• Microsoft missed the boat on Web 2.0 and are 10 years behind on their web product offerings, still clinging on to Office and desktop software.
• Blockbuster is getting eaten alive by Netflix and Hulu because customers want their movies now, with a smile. Nobody drives to a store anymore.
• New York Times is almost bankrupt because bloggers and twitterers are reporting news quicker. Citizen journalism at its finest.

Nobody can predict the future, so trying to strategize and prognosticate what the next trend is, is foolish. The key is to adapt.

• Amazon went from selling books, to selling everything on the internet
• Google went from search engines to ads. They invented a whole new market.
• Apple saw the shift towards mobile computing and brought us the jesus phone (iPhone).
• Honda and Toyota see that gas prices are unruly. Fuel efficient cars are on all of their product roadmaps.