In Competitive Intelligence I am WAY more worried about the companies that COULD be become competitive. I can see and I know my current competitors. I worry way more about similar-sized entrants (not startups unless acquired), substitution product, way different ways to do something and forced commoditization. Forced commoditization is the worst - when some large org decides to give away what you produce for free to help grow or drive their core value prop. They don't even do it intentionally most of the time. My favorite example - Google Maps... back in the day there was a healthy level of competition around providing driving directions and there was a clear level of what people were absolutely willing to pay for it. Google came in, gave it away for free, with the intent to help enhance their search product. Basically killed a multi-billion TAM industry in 12 months. Most companies in the industry were gone - or at least were changed forever. #CompetitiveIntelligence
Great perspective. Taking it one step further, while Google commoditized consumer mapping, they failed when they tried to extend to enterprise-level mapping and analysis, something not in their DNA. Eventually, they effectively handed over that business to Esri, the market leader. https://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2016/02/10/the-godfather-of-digital-maps/
Competitive Positioning | Stop using competitive intel just for battlecards | Founder at downtoat.co
2dFeeling that last one hard... at a previous role we competed with three giants (basically, all the incumbents) who gave away what we did as part of a bundled suite. But in b2b unlike b2c, the industry can still exist, especially for niche use cases or ICPs (and niche doesn't necessarily mean small, just smaller). It's still possible to compete (we were and plenty of others in the space), but the objections and rationale are going to be different and specific for each competitor.