Who is your competition?

Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?
Your guess is probably Sony, Canon or Nikon. The answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia, whose main industry in India is not cameras, but cell phones.

Therefore, cameras bundled with mobile phones are overselling and outstand alone cameras. Now, what prevents mobile phone will replace your camera directly? Nothing. One can only hope that Sony's and Canon's notes.

Try this. Who is the biggest music business in India? You think it's HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling call melodies (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies by selling music albums (that run for hours).

Incidentally Airtel is not in the music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India. That kind of competition is difficult to detect, even harder to beat (as long as you have identified what has already gone beyond you). But if we imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel parents) are breathing easier than you may not be further from the truth. 

Nokia confessed that they all but missed the bus Smartphone. They admit that phone that Apple and Google's Android could make life difficult in the future. But you never thought of Google as a mobile company, right? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a greater deployment of play. It is less mobile or music or camera or emails? 

The Mahabharata (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is personal digital device of the future”? Will it be a souped up mobile or palmtop with a phone? These are all small wars in addition to the great battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question - "Who is my competitor?" 

 Intriguing question "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart get the answer almost immediately. Sony defines its market as music from audio (from the Walkman). He never expected an IT company like Apple to invade your audio domain. Now I think, is it really surprising? A capability such as computer maker Apple has both audio and video. So what did Sony think that he will not compete in pure audio? "Elementary Watson”, so also, Kodak has defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its business as "digital".

In the digital camera market two mesh perfectly. Kodak was torn between going digital money and sacrifice on the film camera or a stay with movies and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided lost in both. It had. It does not "who is my rival for tomorrow?" The same was true for IBM mainframe revenues which prevents seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates stated that "Internet is a fad!" and then turned to bundle the browser with Windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is competing with today. Competitor today is clear. Tomorrow is not. 

In 2008, who was the toughest competitor of British Airways in India? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Perhaps, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services from HP and Cisco. Travel declined due to a recession. Senior IT managers in India and abroad were forced by their headquarters to use videoconferencing to reduce travel budget. So much so, that mad Scramble for U.S. visas from Indian techies were nowhere in 2008. (India has a quota of 65,000 visas for something like the U.S. They went a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business after the recession is not something I would use. In the short term yes. In a full term no. Remember, if there is a place where Newton's law of gravity applies in addition to physics is the electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (over Blue-Ray disc player) to third crash of his original level in India. Value PC's dropped hundreds of thousands to ten thousands rupees. If this trend repeats telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of the airlines then. Because not much money. Then surely RIP!

India has two passions. Movies and cricket. The two markets were clearly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shahrukh Khan and the other Khans that followed). That was when cricket was a fundamental test cricket or at most 50 over cricket. Then came the IPL and two markets together in one. IPL cricket to put 20's on. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of 3 hours long film. Cricket was rival film. On the eve of IPL matches cinemas emptied. Desperate advanced multiplex owners of rights for the IPL matches at film screening rooms to hang to the public. As for IPL were the mainstay of cricket, because it is likely, films must order their releases, so there is no clash with IPL matches. As public concerns both what are called in India 3 hours "Tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season could push films from the market. 

Look at the products disappeared from India in the past 20 years. When did you last see a black and white film? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last letters on a typewriter? The answer to all the above is "I do not know!" All the time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today's most technologically challenged guys when I use the computer as a typewriter upgrade. Typewriters necessarily are nowhere. 

One last illustration. 20 years back some Indians were used to wake them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm." The alarm was a monster made of mechanical springs. It was physically typed every day to keep running. It made so much noise as an alarm, that woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then quartz clocks that were slimmer. They were much milder but still quaintly called "alarms." What we use today for the awakening in the morning? Mobile phone! A whole industry of clocks disappeared without warning through mobile phones. Large companies like Titan watches were the losers. You never know where your competitor is hiding bush! 

In a lighter vein, for authors who are the competitors? Joke machines spit? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, a Polish tagged joke machine to a phone much to the gaiety of Silicon Valley). Or will the competition robots tell stories? The future is scary! The boss of an IT company ever said anything interesting about the animal called competition. He said: "Have breakfast ... or .... his breakfast"! That sums it quite clearly