# The Web Economy/22
## Marketshare and Mindshare

This is a lesson part of the module The Web Economy out of the Open Source ERP/Executive Masters course conducted by a private university.

## Topics

* Cyberspace is where new startups suddenly take on dominant marketshare with virtually no resistance due to been first movers.
* However smart competitors could wrestle away the big players share by focusing on certain tactics such as the Attention Economy and local culture.
* Naming strategy is vital in dotcoms as what is visible are usually the name spaces and not geographical places.
* Mindshare can overcome marketshare easily as there are no geographical barriers.

### Assignment Tasks

* Discuss the above with popular examples.
* What are the distinct strategies used to overcome competitors?
* How can ERP be branded in cyberspace?

### Activities

* Publish your works in an attractive manner in your user page, stating your own views and findings providing links to your sources. Use the talk page here to score marks.
* Create or edit sub-pages of course materials within wikiversity.
* Discuss in the forum (link shall be provided) by offering your ideas and answering or comment on others' postings.

## Essay
### Introduction

       For a brand to be successful it must have a big share of the market in its competing category.
       For example the desktop market is under Microsoft and also flavours of Linux. Among Linux there are brands such as Redhat, Suse and Ubuntu.
       Open source or been free is the fastest way (without paying any marketing fee) to gain mindshare.

### Like Julius Caesar

       “I came, I saw, I conquer”. It was that easy in ancient times when there are not much competition and modernity. So was it with the early days of the web in the mid 1990s.
       Freeware and the web allow lightning fast adoption of it. When Netscape browser was first available it very quickly occupy about 80% of all surfer base in 1996.
       For first movers: in the search engine it is Yahoo!; in email it is Hotmail. Been first made the creators multi-millionaires. For Yahoo! today its owners are billionaires.
       Their secret was simple but not so obvious when they first started. Most of us are followers. When they succeeded only then we say “Ah! Why didn’t I think of it?!”

### Now You Know

       Even though the dotcom bubble burst in the early post Y2K years, many still believe the power of the web in flattening the new market in cyberspace. All you have to do is to anchor to something free.

### Too Many Cats

       Of course you cannot do another email service or a search engine that easily and hope to make billions right away like before. You got to wrestle away the marketshare of E-Bay or Amazon. But how do you do that?
       There are millions of others having your same idea.
       Thus Open Sourcing your sourcecode can be a good way to enter the game.

### How Google Did It

       But how did Google took over Yahoo! from behind? And they did is so quickly and without much battle.
       It was a well studied plan obviously. Knowing that hardisk space is cheap Google launches services that has almost unlimited capacity. They offered 200 megabytes of email account space whereas Yahoo! standard was 4 megabytes!
       They remove all advertising clutter (remember attention poverty?) from their search engine window. I suspect that is why they are faster (and even suspect further that their mathematical algorithm superiority in their search engine may be a farce just to misled the market).

### The Power Of Name

       But the most important element I believe is in its name. You can say ‘Google for it’, easier than “Yahoo for it”. The Google word has entered our dictionary before Yahoo could!
       That is why i thought about a good brandname to use when i first created my web presence. I thought about a short 4 letter name as 4 lettered dotcoms are almost dried up. Using my name “Redhuan’ it sounded like ‘Red1’. It is catchy and my friends and me like it.

### Cyber-Territory

       As you clearly are aware, territory or geography in cyberspace is non-existence or in the form of ‘space’ rather than ‘place’. Thus what is expensive there is not areas but names. URLs are known to sell for millions and all the good generic dictionary names are taken up.
       Can you think of a good name better than Google? Please email me and no one else!