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0:00
My name is Andrew Ward.
I'm a professor at
Lehigh University and
co-author of
"Strategic Management:
from Theory to Practice".
This talk is about firms
competing in different
competitive spaces.
0:15
In strategy, when we
look at how firms compete
with one another,
the dominant models, such as
Michael Porter's
five forces model,
looks at the level
of the industry.
These models are great at
understanding the
dynamics of an industry,
but are less useful
at helping us
understand the dynamics
at the company level.
Why companies choose to
enter different arenas of
competition and competing across
multiple domains of competition.
Especially in markets
such as technology,
many firms compete in
multiple nascent
competitive arenas
or competitive spaces,
which are not yet established
enough to be considered
true industries.
So in order to better understand
competitive advantage
at the firm level,
it is often better to look
at why and how firms enter
different competitive spaces in
their pursuit of
competitive advantage.
1:06
As we are doing
throughout this series,
we will illustrate this concept
with the example of Alphabet,
the parent company of Google.
If we just think about the
primary industry of Alphabet,
there are in the advertising
industry with Google,
their primary product, being
a search engine that
generates its revenue
through advertising.
However, that really doesn't
give us anything like
the complete picture of
the competitive spaces
that Alphabet is in.
Let's quickly go through some of
these spaces and who they
compete with in those spaces.
1:38
As a search engine,
Alphabet competes with
larger competitors who
compete in many domains,
such as Microsoft, as well as
smaller specialized companies
such as DuckDuckGo.
We see this pattern
of having a mix of
large and small competitors
in many of these spaces.
For advertising,
Alphabet competes in
both the display and placement
facets of advertising.
It competes with consumer-facing
companies like Amazon,
Meta and Apple, but
also non-consumer facing
behind the scenes
companies, like The Trade Desk.
To some extent, Alphabet
could also be said to be
competing with other non-digital
forms of advertising,
such as television and print.
In that, the ultimate purchase
of advertising is deciding
between different forms of
advertising when making
their purchase decision.
While there are
numerous, smaller,
specialized cloud
service providers,
Alphabet primarily
competes with Amazon and
Microsoft as the big
three cloud providers
as well as others such
as Oracle and IBM.
For music streaming, while
Alphabet competes again
with Amazon and Apple,
there are also significant
specialist players
in this competitive space,
such as Spotify and
Tidal amongst others.
Similarly, in
user-generated video
streaming, Alphabet's
YouTube competes with
social media companies,
such as Meta with Facebook
and Instagram, and Tik Tok.
Turning to physical products,
Alphabet competes in
the competitive space
of tablet devices with Apple,
Microsoft, Amazon, and Samsung.
And in cell phones with
companies like Apple,
LG, Motorola, and Samsung.
In digital payments, not
only does Alphabet compete,
once again, head to
head with Apple,
but also with significant
specialized companies such as
PayPal and it's Venmo
product, and Zelle.
In internet browsers, again,
we see a mix of
multiple competitors,
such as Microsoft and Apple,
as well as specialists
such as Firefox.
Finally, in voice
artificial intelligence,
Alphabet competes primarily
with Apple and Amazon.
