Ecological Niches

"It is critically important to appreciate that
although healthy ecosystems should create
new niches, it does not follow that old niches
must persist. In fact, decreased diversity in
some areas of an ecosystem enable the creation
of niches in others. The collapse of mainframe-
related business niches gave rise to a
plethora of new domains related to personal
computing and client-server networks."

"Physical dominators, the ultimate
aggressors, eventually control much of
an ecosystem. But at least they are responsible
for creating the value that they capture. During
the heyday of mainframes, IBM dominated
the computing ecosystem, providing most of
the products and services its customers
needed. The strategy was effective, allowing
IBM to create and extract enormous value for
long periods of time. But it failed when IBM
encountered the PC ecosystem, which was
much more open and distributed, supported
by effective keystone strategies put forth by
the likes of Microsoft and Apple (and, yes,
even IBM itself), and which reached much
higher levels of innovation and flexibility."

"Strategy as Ecology"
by Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien
Harvard Business Review
March 2004