Book Review

Book Review
By Richard Mateosian

Inside the Tornado: Marketing Strategies from Silicon Valley's Cutting Edge
by Geoffrey A. Moore (HarperCollins, NY, 1995, 0-88730-765-5, $25.00)

Geoffrey Moore, who started as an English professor, was a partner at the public relations firm Regis McKenna, Inc, and a sales and marketing executive in the software industry. He now has his own consulting firm. His earlier work, Crossing the Chasm (Harper, 1991), deals with a stage in the development of high tech markets. The chasm is the transition from having a few visionary customers to having hordes of pragmatic ones.

The tornado is what snatched Dorothy and Toto from the plains of Kansas and set them down in the fabulous Land of Oz. Similar tornados have snatched Compaq Computers, Oracle Corporation, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, and others from drab beginnings and set them down in a fabulous land where annual revenues are measured in billions of dollars.

As followers of the evening news know, most tornado victims reach a different outcome. Tornados are dangerous and unpredictable—in real life and in the business world. The tornados Moore talks about are market forces caused by discontinuous innovation, also known as paradigm shifts.

William J. Mitchell in his wonderful book City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (MIT, 1995) gives a good picture of the underlying dynamic. Mitchell is sitting in an airport lounge, using his laptop to write his book. He says:

"When it can no longer connect me to the electronic environment as effectively as some competing product (even though it still works perfectly well), I shall simply transfer my software and data and throw the superseded carcass away; the information ecosystem is a ferociously Darwinian place that produces endless mutations and quickly weeds out those no longer able to adapt and compete."

What's true of hardware is even truer of software. It takes a small investment and a few moments to replace one web browser or spreadsheet program with another. As the power of the underlying silicon advances exponentially, the tradeoffs that made yesterday's software successful now hang around its neck like a millstone. Somebody introduces a whole new way of doing things, and another tornado rips up the playing field.

Moore's book addresses the obvious questions: how do you predict and prepare for tornados, what do you do when you're in one, how do you predict and prepare for the tornado's end, and what do you do after it's over.

Moore can't answer these questions completely, but he sets forth some guidelines. If you're interested in learning how to be a gorilla among the chimpanzees and monkeys, reading Moore's book is the way to do it. But there's more to it than that. Moore mixes the animal metaphors with good practical advice. Much of what he says complements and reinforces what business writers like Tom Peters have been saying for years. This is an interesting book, and if you're involved in high-tech marketing, you have to read it.