Inside the Tornado
Marketing Strategies from Silicon Valley
Chapter OneThe Land of Oz
At the beginning of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and Toto are caught up inside a tornado, swept away from their mundane world of Kansas, and deposited into the marvelous land of Oz. This miraculous form of ascension is also reenacted from time to time on our own public stock exchanges.
Consider the following:
- Compaq Computers, which in recent years has overtaken IBM as the leader of the Intel-based PC market, grew from zero to $1 billion in less than five years.
- Ditto for Conner Peripherals, the disk-drive storage company who slipstreamed Compaq's hypergrowth by supplying it, as well as many of its competitors, with low-cost Winchester hard drives.
- Over a six-year period from 1977 to 1982, Atari's home game business doubled in size every year, driving the company from $50 million to $1.6 billion in revenues.
- In successive years during the mid-1980s, Mentor Graphics grew from $2 million to $25 million to $85 million to $135 million to $200 million.
- For the e ... read full excerpt from: Inside the Tornado ebook
