I love niche businesses. Companies pursuing a niche strategy serve narrow target markets with a product or service uniquely designed for that market. Most start-ups are niche businesses, like Exact Sciences. It brought one noninvasive cancer test (for colon cancer) to the market. The company disrupted the invasive colonoscopy market and opened testing to younger patients and those reticent to have a colonoscopy. The only problem with a niche strategy is that there’s no guarantee today’s non-competitors will stay in their swim lanes. If they move into yours, you may not be able to defend your market position. Let’s look at some examples. The New York Times’ coverage of Amazon’s cloud computing business, A.W.S. (for Amazon Web Services) offers one case study. A.W.S. now packages software as part of its web-hosting offering. A.W.S. users find it easier to get their software needs…
Facts, false facts, or both?
As the clock turns from 11:59:59 PM to 12:00:00 AM, we pass from one date to another. Two sides of midnight, as I like to say. The two times have different spaces on a calendar, but they are almost precisely the same time. I’ve been thinking a lot about two sides of the same thing as I listen to the debate around impeachment and share notes with my friend Jonathan Barry, a brilliant Republican. He regularly has a different reaction than my own to an op-ed column about impeachment. “Uneducated,” “hypnotized by Fox News,” “ignorant,” and other words Democrats use to dismiss Republicans cannot be used with Jonathan (or many other Republican friends and colleagues). Both the GOP and the Democrats have said in public, “The facts speak for themselves.” Yet both sides have reached very different conclusions. How do our political…