Read on to find some interesting facts you have not thought of......
Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?
Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business is not cameras but cell phones.
Reasons being cameras bundled with cell phones are outselling standalone cameras. Now, what prevents the cellphones from replacing cameras outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope that Sony and Canon are taking note.
Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think its HMV or SaReGaMa? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that just play for 30 secs) Airtel makes more than what music companies can make by selling music albums that run for hours!
Incidentally, Airtel is not into music business.It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India. But that sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat.
Nokia confessed that it missed the smartphone bus. They admitted that Apple's iphone and Google's Android can make things difficult in the future. And you never thought google was a mobile company, did you?
In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India? Singapore Airlines? Better still Indian Airlines? Well, there are competitor
s who can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008.
Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business is not cameras but cell phones.
Reasons being cameras bundled with cell phones are outselling standalone cameras. Now, what prevents the cellphones from replacing cameras outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope that Sony and Canon are taking note.Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think its HMV or SaReGaMa? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that just play for 30 secs) Airtel makes more than what music companies can make by selling music albums that run for hours!
Incidentally, Airtel is not into music business.It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India. But that sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat.
Nokia confessed that it missed the smartphone bus. They admitted that Apple's iphone and Google's Android can make things difficult in the future. And you never thought google was a mobile company, did you?
In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India? Singapore Airlines? Better still Indian Airlines? Well, there are competitor
s who can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008.India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve
of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.
One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!
The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast ...or.... be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.
of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!
The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast ...or.... be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.
Courtesy: Businessweek.com
Adapted from the article by: Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi who is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.