PRUEBAS

propositions centered on convenience of purchase and use. In the face of this, Compaq responded byactively pursuing this second approach, aggressively fighting any upmarket drift by producing a line ofcomputers with low prices and modest functionality targeted to the needs of the lower tiers of themarket.The third strategic option for dealing with these dynamics is to use marketing initiatives to steepen theslopes of the market trajectories so that customers demand the performance improvements that thetechnologists provide. Since a necessary condition for the playing out of these dynamics is that theslope of the technology trajectory be steeper than the market’s trajectory, when the two slopes areparallel, performance oversupply—and the progression from one stage of the product life cycle to thenext—does not occur or is at least postponed.Some computer industry observers believe that Microsoft, Intel, and the disk drive companies havepursued this last strategy very effectively. Microsoft has used its industry dominance to create andsuccessfully market software packages that consume massive amounts of disk memory and requireever-faster microprocessors to execute. It has, essentially, increased the slopes of the trajectories ofimprovement in functionality demanded by their customers to parallel the slope of improvementprovided by their technologists. The effect of this strategy is described in Figure 9.5, depicting recentevents in the disk drive industry. (This chart updates through 1996 the disk drive trajectory map inFigure 1.7.) Notice how the trajectories of capacity demanded in the mid-range, desktop, and notebookcomputer segments kinked upward in the 1990s along a path that essentially paralleled the capacitypath blazed by the makers of 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch disk drives. Because of this, these markets have notexperienced performance oversupply in recent years. The 2.5-inch drive remains locked within thenotebook computer market because capacity demanded on the desktop is increasing at too brisk a pace.The 3.5-inch drive remains solidly ensconced in the desktop market, and the 1.8-inch drive haspenetrated few notebook computers, for the same reasons. In this situation, the companies whoseproducts are positioned closest to the top of the market, such as Seagate and IBM, have been the mostprofitable, because in the absence of technology oversupply, a shift in the stages of the product lifecycle at the high end of the market has been held at bay.Figure 9.5 Changed Performance Demand Trajectories and the Deferred Impact of DisruptiveTechnologies155