The similarity of circling mode in business.

I was enlightened by the facts in IT industry. One idea came to me for many times but I forgt it for many times, too. This time, I got the chance to write it down.

The initiative was the standard of websites, W3C. Nowadays, most Personal Computer users use Microsoft Windows as their Operating System, and use IE as the main browser. What happened to other web browsers? Since Microsoft has asked the websites to adapt their websites under the standard fo IE series, the non-IE browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, etc. could not display the content on the websites properly (The non-IE web browsers are complied with W3C standard).What happened then? Regular competitors are in disadvantage because they follow international standards! Isn't it ironic? International standars are less powerful than the standard of a company? The whole thing is contributed to the large amount of users of Microsoft Windows. To the two sides, one who gets the large amount of users will be in precedence of controling the whole game. Presently, Microsoft controls the large amount of users, and such standards that produced by themselves formed an inwarded circle. Only the members inside the circle are rewarded under the regulation. If the members of the out circle form a sinmilar enclosed circle, tehy become worse and the inwarded members gain more profit throughthe enclosed circle.

This mode is similar to the situation in today's telecom industry. As is well known, China Mobile, the biggest telecom company in China, has formed an inwarded circle through pricing, and China Unicom has formed another enclosed circle. Apparently, china Unicom is in disadvantage.

What will happen consequently? Fortunately, the government has ordered the telecom corporations to follow the unified price between two different companies, therefore, the boundary has crashed, and the competition will come back to normal competition soon. In IT industry, there is only one circle-the Microsoft circle. The members outside the Microsoft circle are always opened, there, Microsoft is shortening itself through circling since the open-sourced software industry is booming not only in China but also in other places around the world.

These two industries are not the same with each other, however, the business strategic modes are the same: enclosing the territory through technique methods and squeeze competitors out. There are more cases following this mode such as IM software, QQ, MSN, GTalk.

How funny the market is!