Violent thread title aside, I've been wondering about certain companies' business models (and I don't mean an Arrested Development business model). It seems as though whenever a company produces a great product that woos the market, its rivals will try to combat it by launching a 'killer'.
Examples:
iPhone vs
HTC Touch
iPod vs more or less everything else
What's more is that these products never do what they're intended to do. They get branded as possible [product x] killers, but when the products finally hit the shelves, they turn out to be bleak copies of the thing they were trying to kill in the first place.
Has anybody got an example of a product killer that actually ends up doing the job? And secondly, when will people realize this strategy isn't working, and that beating the market leader actually requires a product that does things differently, or at least better? Then again, there is also the question of the power of brand names, which I suppose is why I chose the two examples I did.
Any thoughts?
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Google killed just about every other search engine out there. All those companies were too big to go down, so they changed their products. Either they stopped competing by changing their business model, or they improved their product.
So the 'killers' don't really kill products. At least not frequently. Not that I can really recall.
They do frequently help to shape the market and force large companies to improve their products or services.
The term seems much more popular with fanboys and cheerleaders than it is with actual marketers or vanilla consumers.
Nintendo is doing fine now. Some of it's product were not a sucessful as they could have been, but they didn't die so much as became obsolete. It would have happened without help from sony, and now the Wii is probably the top selling console world wide, and whatever hand held they are on is dominating that market.
And since Playstation was the leader of the last two generations of hardware, could we rightfully call the XBox a Playstation killer? Because the 360 is no small reason the PS3 is collecting dust on most store shelves.
There are a great many things Sony could do to save it.
I still have a wee little bit of hope. They haven't crushed it all.
I don't.
Do not forget Pokemon. I would say that was THE thing that kept bringing in sacks of money. Of course not making truly horrendous business decisions like Sega did helped a lot too.