Act One of Three in a Symphony, 27. Juli 2000

In act one Dr. Porter's sets up his model and makes it internally consistent. It allows for analysis of industries, just like the second act allows for this analysis to demonstrate which entitities within an industry have achieve competitive advantage. It is a great book but it must be read as a trio or you miss the point.

      Still going strong and worth the read..., 13. Februar 2000

This is Porter's classic work on business strategy, and the bible of the positioning school of strategy. Sure, the field of strategy has progressed significantly over the past two decades, but is "Competitive Strategy" therefore obsolete? Absolutely not! The models are still valid and highly relevant -- they just need to be augmented with additional new economy strategic concepts. To master a subject one must understand it in many different ways, and so every serious strategist must thoroughly digest this work.

       How Important Are Competitors in Setting Future Strategy?, 15. Dezember 1999

Anyone would agree that this book is the best overview of competitive strategy analysis ever written. The strength of the book is a solid outline of subjects and questions to improve your thinking, and get to be a step ahead of the competition. In highly-competitive, commodity businesses, that's usually what strategies focus on.

On the other hand, the rapid advances of knowledge and technology mean that the relevant benchmark is perfection, not the competitor, in defining an ideal best practice. In that world, this book has serious limitations, because the competitive dimension is often less important than the customer and user dimension these days.

Any business arena begins, as Peter Drucker so aptly put it, with the task "to create a customer." That reminder is especially relevant today when they are so many new ways to serve a customer's needs that no one has ever considered before. The strategic point of 'Blown to Bits' for example is that almost every business will see its vertical value chain (moving from resources through to the customer) broken apart into tiny segments each served by specialists. If you did not begin with that perspective in analyzing the impact of electronically-based business practices, you could easily focus on the wrong tasks using this book to create an over-broad strategy focus, rather than concentrating on just a few areas.

I suspect that the applications of Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law need to be explicitly considered as part of the analysis that Professor Porter is recommending.

A more general weakness in this book is that it assumes that future conditions will be stable enough to draw conclusions about which conditions will be favorable, without giving enough guidance on how to deal with the increasing frequencies and degrees of volatility that we see (in areas like financial markets, commodity prices, the weather, changing customer preferences, and so forth).

Although no book that takes such a narrow focus can help but have weaknesses (like having the podiatrist not notice that you have kidney problems), if you want a good start of how to think about competitors, this is the book for you. Just be sure you keep developing yours strategy with additional dimensions after you finish using this analysis.

If you have read none of Professor Porter's works, this is the one book you should read.

      Excellent reference for strategic analysis., 1. Oktober 1999

Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter is an excellent source for providing critical analysis for strategic planning. This book outlines Porter's Five Forces Model in a fabulous, easy to comprehend writing style. However, the one flaw to this book is that it is a little weak in the area of emerging technology. It tended to be a little more vague with its detail then the rest of the book. Overall, it is still an excellent book and I would recommend it to everyone in the business community. (Especially MBA students)

       Good but take some of it with a pinch of salt., 25. August 1999

This is probably the most comprehensive book on the subject. However, there are a few areas where it's recommendations may not be entirely correct. For example, suppliers have been taken as one of the five competitive forces. After the success of several companies in becoming more competitive by building closer relations with their suppliers (e.g. in implementing JIT), is this still valid? For example, must companies increase the number of suppliers to reduce their power (when so many other companies have been able to reduce their costs by giving one supplier Economies of Scale)? Also, given that 'Quality is Free' (at least up to a point), are the strategies of 'Differentiation' and 'Cost Leadership' really mutually exclusive? Readers are advised to take some of the recommendations with a pinch of salt.