Suffering from IPO interruptus? Perhaps your Box is full of the same soap as the others

You don't have to have a monopoly to build a successful company, but it sure helps. And if you've not got a monopoly then you do need something, anything, to differentiate your product so that there's actually some compelling reason why customers might actually use your services and pay you a margin. There'd better be …

[Paul Webb]

You might as well have just said...

"What can Box, Square, or any other such company, do to differentiate themselves in a commodity market?"

... without the need for the rest of the article, which adds nothing.

[Alex McDonald 1]

Re: You might as well have just said...

Commodity to you, but useful to me, since I'd never heard of Veblen goods until today.

[Quentin North]

Niche market

You can niche market a commodity to make it profitable. For example, most (all?) cloud providers today are US companies. There has in recent weeks been issues about data protection for European data on US company cloud services. Even if the data centre is in the EU the company HQ is in the US and subject to US action. This is a BIG deal for the public sector which is legally required to ensure personal data is not exported outside the EU. This means I can't provide Dropbox or Box or AWS to my organisation until we can be certain that US action will not seize cloud stored data which in my organisation frequently includes personal data. Therefore a niche player who HQ is in Europe and provides a Dropbox/Box like solution could sweep up in the public sector.

[Dr Who]

Build brand loyalty by developing trust, by communicating, and by providing exemplary customer service. People expect stuff to go wrong, it's how a company deals with problems that matters.

We use Rackspace over Amazon because their motto is Fanatical Support, and they mean it. In the ten years that we've been using them the odd thing has gone wrong of course, but the support has always been first class.

Don't pretend your rubber dog turd is better than the next guy's rubber dog turd. Instead, supply it with a smile and savour the whiff of success!

[TheOtherHobbes]

>Standard Oil dominated the turn of last century's oil markets not because of Rockefeller being an evil bastard but because they were the lowest cost producer. Anyone wanted a price war then Standard were going to win it (the evil bastardy came from the fact that Standard was quite happy to start the wars, to the benefit of consumers).

Only in the short term. As soon as the competitors died, Standard Oil jacked up prices to obscene levels.

But then, as I keep saying, consumers are the primary market commodity. The real customers of both markets and monopolies are speculators and upper management, all of whom make out like (literal) bandits.

[Andrew Moore]

Guinness did exactly the same thing in Ireland

[Al fazed]

hmmm

>Standard Oil dominated the turn of last century's oil markets not because of Rockefeller being an evil bastard but because they were the lowest cost producer. Anyone wanted a price war then Standard were going to win it (the evil bastardy came from the fact that Standard was quite happy to start the wars, to the benefit of consumers).

>>Only in the short term. As soon as the competitors died, Standard Oil jacked up prices to obscene levels.<<

Is there any other kind of capitalism ?

It's all about exploitation of any differential for the benefit of creating a profit. A word which is now often heard (in the sharing economy) used like a rude word.

[kraftdinner]

Let's not forget that 'ol Rockyfeller made a secret deal with the railways to cut his transportation costs in half thus shutting out his competition. If only economists could account for human greed behavior...there should be a greed-index built into our elasticity charts.