The Rotten Word

Gadget gurus and tech press are always a-buzz about which product will kill which other product next. But all this homicidal rhetoric is exaggerated and misses the point. The same advice that works so well for many people also works well for products: find your niche and rise to the top of it. And companies know it – it just doesn’t make for very compelling writing.

I was sifting through my Google Reader subscriptions this morning, when I noticed a headline from one of my absolute favorite tech blogs, The Register. The story, by Jon Collins, is entitled “Chrome OS: Windows killer?” The article discusses the threat, real or implied, that Google’s new operating system venture poses to Microsoft.

It is a reasonable thought, that Google is trying to maintain its overall competitive advantage, especially since Microsoft released its newest search engine offering, Bing. Still, Google is to search market share what Windows is to OS market share. And neither side of that equation is going to change any time.

“Killing”

My most recent overindulgent tech purchase, the Palm Pre, has been touted as a potential iPhone killer over and over and over again. Leading-edge tech blog Ars Technica labeled it, perhaps more appropriately, “the Blackberry killer” in their review of the Pre.

But most of these attempted-murder metaphors are falling flat, at least on my ears. The “killer” image is something created and perpetuated by outsiders, and isn’t something that these companies ever embrace. In fact, Palm chairman Jonathan Rubenstein told the New York Times in January that, in developing the Pre, there was never any intention to build an iPhone killer. And for good reason: this claim would often just be a set-up for failure. No one is going to kill the iPhone, at least not in the next 5 years. And we all know that.

Google may be thinking along the same no-intentions-of-killing lines about their new operating system. Their entrance into the market would certainly change the playing field, currently dominated by the Microsoft-Apple duality and supplemented by a small but growing group of hardcore Linux users (check please). Of course, the dynamic is further complicated by the fact that Linux, whose most popular iteration is my own personal choice, Ubuntu, forms the foundation of Chrome OS. The combined power of the Linux development community and Google’s brand and brawn brings together images of world-changing cooperation reminiscent, in a Saturday-morning-cartoon sort of way, of Captain Planet. Okay, maybe I went too far with that one.

But this all leads me to my own point: let’s get away from the all the “killing” and come up with something more appropriate.

“Niching”

Merriam-Webster defines a “niche” as a “specialized market” and that is a far better mode of description. This isn’t about killing competitors – it’s about niching yourself. Windows caters to enterprise users, who often require powerful applications like email, productivity tools, and CRM software. Mac OS targets creatives who deal with multimedia creation.

Google’s Chrome OS? It will likely target fanboys of the cloud (another check, please, assuming the security is sufficient) and of speedy, tiny netbooks. People that prefer their email, spreadsheets, and contact management to happen on distant servers, freeing room for multimedia storage and memory for highly interactive UIs.  Google is aiming its OS sights on netbooks – those stripped-down, ultraportable, cloud-happy little devices that have been exploding in popularity recently. I wouldn’t even be surprised to see Google favoring specific hardware developers in the future to create a product that will likely be called the “Mac Book Air killer.” But that comparison will also miss the point.

In the same vein, the makers of my wonderul Palm Pre aren’t trying to kill the iPhone, which targets hip young professionals and early-adopters, not to mention the relatively well-off who can afford AT&T’s monthly plan. They aren’t even trying to kill the Blackberry, which has a lock on mobile for enterprise. Yes, they are hoping to gain some market share in that arena. But they are primarily niching – that is, looking to fill the gap between iPhone and Blackberry users. It’s an interesting audience. I should know – I’m one of them.

Who are we? Well, for starters we don’t make as strenuous a cry for all-encompassing enterprise support. We don’t need to edit video on our handset. The typical Blackberry screen isn’t big enough for our liking. We enjoy a touchscreen, but respect both the tactile nature and more business-like appearance of a real keyboard. We appreciate a vast library of applications, but we also appreciate the ability to run more than one of them at any given time, and tend to favor quality over quantity in the long run.

Trying to put smiles on the faces of people who have been straddling the fence between the iPhone and a Blackberry is one, and perhaps currently the best, example of niching. And as the big guns of the industry go forth and multiply, as is the case with Google joining Microsoft and Apple and the Pre joining the iPhones and Blackberries of the world, increasingly smaller and more specialized markets will gain representation and demographic-specific options will continue to proliferate.

There’s no reason to kill – there are niches enough for everyone.