Domain 01 · 36 cases
Strategy & Competitive Advantage
How the best companies build moats, pick fights, disrupt themselves, and turn a single decision into a position rivals can see but cannot copy.
- Spot the moat that competitors can see but still cannot copy
- Decide when to disrupt yourself before a rival does it for you
- Tell a real structural edge from a discount anyone could win
Adobe Creative Cloud
In 2012, Adobe did something that looked like self-sabotage: it stopped selling its creative software in boxes and forced customers onto a monthly…
Alibaba vs eBay: Local Beats Global
In 2002 eBay rolled into China with everything a winner is supposed to have: global brand, deep pockets, and a marketplace playbook proven across dozens of…
Amazon Web Services
By the early 2000s, Amazon's engineers were burning weeks of effort spinning up compute, storage, and databases for every new project. So they built a…
Android vs. iPhone
In 2007 Apple shipped the iPhone as a sealed system, hardware, OS, and App Store under one roof, and captured nearly every dollar of value in the stack.…
Apple and the iPhone
When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, the iPod was its best-selling product and a symbol of its comeback from near-collapse. It was not a business in…
Apple's Ecosystem
Apple doesn't make it hard to leave. It makes leaving feel increasingly irrational, and that distinction is worth a few trillion dollars. iMessage turns…
ARM: License Everything, Build Nothing
ARM does not make a single chip, yet its processor designs sit inside most of the smartphones on the planet. Spun out of Acorn Computers in the late 1980s as…
Best Buy: Surviving the Showroom
By the early 2010s, Amazon had turned Best Buy stores into free showrooms: customers walked in, handled the product, then bought it cheaper online. The stock…
Blockbuster vs Netflix
Around 2000, Netflix founder Reed Hastings flew to Dallas to pitch a partnership, and Blockbuster's executives reportedly laughed him out of the room. A…
Booking.com: Own the Demand
Hotels once controlled their own distribution. Then a Dutch site that launched in 1996 aggregated enough traveler demand that hotels had to list on it or…
Coke vs Pepsi: The Discipline of a Duopoly
Coke and Pepsi spent decades attacking each other in advertising, shelf space, sponsorships, and taste tests, the Pepsi Challenge even helped goad Coke into…
De Beers
Diamonds are not actually rare. When huge deposits surfaced in South Africa in the late 1800s, the obvious danger was a price collapse. De Beers,…
Disney
Walt Disney grasped something early that most studios missed: the character, not the film, is the asset. A movie runs in theaters for a few months; Mickey,…
Ferrari: The Strategy of Scarcity
Ferrari almost always has more buyers than cars, and it likes it that way. Enzo Ferrari was said to insist on building one fewer car than the market wanted.…
Google Search
In 1998, Yahoo, AltaVista, and Excite were all racing to be the internet's home page, cramming stock tickers, horoscopes, news, and chat around a search box…
Honda in America
In 1959, Honda crossed the Pacific and set up a small Los Angeles office with a clear plan: win the American motorcycle market by competing on big,…
IBM Under Gerstner
In 1993, IBM posted roughly $8 billion in losses, the largest single-year corporate loss in American history to that point. Wall Street's prescription was…
Intel and the Strategic Inflection Point
In the mid-1980s, Intel was a memory company watching the business that built its identity slip away. Japanese manufacturers had flooded the market with…
Kodak and the Digital Camera
In 1975, a 24-year-old Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built the first digital camera from off-the-shelf parts and a Super 8 housing. It weighed eight…
Lego's Survival
By 2003, Lego was bleeding roughly $300 million a year and sat weeks from running out of cash. The company that had defined the interlocking plastic brick…
Marvel Studios
In 2008, a studio that had already licensed away its biggest characters out of financial necessity bet borrowed money on an Iron Man film led by an actor…
Microsoft and IBM
IBM built the personal computer that defined an era. Microsoft owned it. In 1980, IBM needed an operating system fast, talks with the dominant OS maker…
Microsoft vs Netscape: The Bundle Play
Netscape invented the commercial web browser and charged for it. Microsoft gave one away free, bundled into the operating system that ran on nearly every PC…
Netflix and Qwikster
In 2011 Netflix was winning. Reed Hastings saw streaming as the future and decided to push customers there fast: a roughly 60 percent price hike for anyone…
Nokia
In 2007 Nokia held roughly 40 percent of the global mobile phone market and had more engineers working on smartphones than almost anyone. Its labs had…
Nvidia: The CUDA Moat
In 2006 Nvidia shipped a software platform almost nobody asked for, and for most of a decade it looked like a costly distraction. Competitors had capable…
Sony Betamax vs VHS
Betamax was widely considered the better technology: sharper picture, more compact format. It lost anyway. In the mid-1970s Sony launched the first…
Southwest Airlines
For decades, the biggest airlines in the world tried to copy Southwest and failed, and not for lack of money or talent. Southwest launched in 1971 on a…
Spotify vs Apple Music
Spotify has to pay its biggest competitor a cut of every subscription sold through that competitor's store. It built a commanding lead in music streaming…
Standard Oil
By the late 1870s, John D. Rockefeller controlled roughly 90 percent of US oil refining, and he did it without discovering a single drop of oil. Founded in…
Tesla's Secret Master Plan
Tesla's plan was never to build a mass-market car first. In a 2006 blog post, Elon Musk laid out a four-step sequence: sell an expensive, low-volume sports…
Trader Joe's
A typical American grocery store carries around 30,000 products. Trader Joe's carries roughly 4,000, most of them private label, and it still beats most…
Warby Parker
Warby Parker launched in 2010 selling prescription glasses online for about $95 a pair, in an industry where the average ran into the hundreds. Behind those…
WeChat's Super-App
WeChat started as a messaging app and, within a few years, became the operating system for daily life in China: payments, shopping, news, healthcare,…
Xerox PARC
Beginning in 1970, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center built the future of computing: the graphical user interface, the mouse, Ethernet, laser printing, and…
Xiaomi: Give Away the Hardware
Founded in China in 2010, Xiaomi sells high-specification smartphones at prices that hover near the cost of building them, undercutting Apple and Samsung by…
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