James Surowiecki Quotes

Domination and monopoly is the name of the game in the web marketplace.

We don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference.

I've never had difficulty dominating any market I've been in.

Many first-time founders fail to understand the difference between the potential of the Total Addressable Market (TAM) and the very finite subsection they can hope to capture. No company ever captures the entire market they pioneer. Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum, and others will jump in from the moment you've identified the potential.

When an entrant competitor attacks the low end of any market, the rational reaction of the incumbent firms is to abandon rather than defend it - because the low end is the least profitable of their possible investments.

He who puts ... a product upon the market as it demands, controls that market, regardless of color. It is simply a survival of the fittest.

Most companies in a capitalistic system compete mightily to obtain monopolistic positions so they can avoid capitalistic competition thereafter. Whenever a business person must compete for price, he tends to describe that derisively as a “commodity business” and tries to remedy the situation.

Sometimes, for businesses, competition can be inconvenient, because competition means that the race is never over, the game is never won. No matter how well you were doing in the past, there's always someone who are out there wanting to take your place. So the temptation to avoid competition is powerful. It's rooted in motives as old as Adam and Eve: in greed for yet more money, in fear of losing your position in the market and all the benefits it brings.

The enterprise market is never winner-take-all.

When a market isn't in transition, gaining market share is hard - you're fighting to take one or two points of share from competitors.

Competition matters.

You want an idea that turns into a monopoly. But you can't get a monopoly, in a big market right away; too much competition for that.

You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly and then quickly expand.

In business, competition is never as healthy as total domination.

When I broke in, in 1957, it was wide open. Now you're up against strong competition.

The way companies hang on to their marketshare is by being scared.

The leader of the market today may not necessarily be the leader tomorrow.

You've got to figure out how you're going to come in and significantly impact and redefine a market such that you become a market share leader in it.

But they are also better, our competitors are better because Wal-Mart exists.

Today, the competition is considerably more intense.

Publishing had been successful where there had been natural geographic monopolies.

The trick is, a market has to be nonexistent when you start. If the market is large early on, you will have too many competitors. You have to make it large.

If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we'd all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars.

All competitors are fierce competitors; Vodafone is the world's second largest company. We fight it each day. Idea Cellular is big and successful, too. Competition is competition; we are used to it.

Competition is good because we need to educate customers, and Ozon.ru itself will not be able to do it.