The Future of OS Gorillas

Anyone remember the Gorilla Game by Geoffrey Moore? It was subtitled "An Investors Guide to Picking Winners in High Technology" and made the case that network effects amongst other influences would often lead to one or two companies becoming the dominating "gorillas" within their industry.

Yesterday I was reading this excellent article by Ben Thompson about Alexa becoming the operating system of the home and how Amazon had positioned it well to be dominant. He makes an excellent case and you should read the article. As background he goes through some recent history telling the story of Microsoft's, Google's and Facebook's rise to dominance within their domains which in turn triggered my thoughts about the Gorilla Game. In some ways he was validating what Moore had stated back in 1998 when he first published. Thompson is suggesting roads to become a Gorilla and Moore was giving you investing advice.

But what if you're in corporate IT? You'll never be a Gorilla, yet their impact is huge.

I think the case that each author makes is pretty solid, to the degree that I would never advise fighting a Gorilla in their own territory. As someone within the Corporate IT world I have licensed and implemented a lot of software in my life. I have been in arguments about the superiority of IBM's OS/2 over Windows, Microsoft vs. Apple desktops, Surface tablets vs. iPads, and on and on. Looking back on it, picking OS/2 over Windows regardless of any advantages it might have had, was fighting the Windows Gorilla and destined to lose. Windows was good enough as an OS and ended up with a far broader and more economical ecosystem.

So how would you apply that rule today to the Surface tablet vs. iPad? Are you selecting the Microsoft Gorilla in the corporate world or the Apple Gorilla in tablets? What about Google Home vs. Amazon Echo? Are you picking Google's dominance in AI or has Amazon carved out a new territory where the Alexa will be Queen (and note all the vendors announcing support this week at CES).

Its a tough choice and I don't have an answer, but if I were deciding today I don't think it would be based on a feature by feature comparison that corporate IT departments so often love. I think these are ecosystem battles that call for a new way to evaluate them against Moore's gorilla criteria, network effects and Thompson's aggregation theory. A lot of future time and cost could be saved if we could figure out how to pick the horse we ride on