Winning Mind Share: Only for the Paranoid?

I was checking out prices in the PC section of a Daiei chain store in Yokohama, recently, when I saw the importance of mind share incarnately demonstrated. I'd stopped to compare prices of similarly equipped Fujitsu and NEC PCs, when I overhead a customer asking a store clerk questions about a multimedia computer from Compaq Japan. The questions were pretty basic, revealing that he was a newcomer to computers: Could he use it for word processing? Would he be able to get onto the Internet?

Then he asked, "And it does have a Pentium microprocessor inside, doesn't it?"

"Of course," responded the salesman. The customer nodded in satisfaction, and after a couple more questions they walked off to the purchasing counter.

Conditioning the users

What a clear demonstration of the importance of mind share. Though but a single example, it's indicative of the reality that many users have only a skimpy understanding of why a particular technology is hot, and that they only vaguely comprehend what that technology can do compared to the competition.

Despite this, the majority of users have been conditioned to care whether the PC has "Intel inside," and whether Microsoft supplies the operating system. Such conditioning is the result of various forces, including media coverage, word-of-mouth, and peer pressure -- backed up by heavy advertising, slick marketing, and sophisticated mind games played by PR teams and corporate management.

The result of such concerted hard work is that Intel and Microsoft are the reigning mind share kings of the industry -- which means that a Pentium processor, Windows 95, and MS-Office are must-have features when it comes to buying a PC in Yokohama, York, or the Yukon.

Losers...

Having captured mind share, though, the victor has to work even harder to meet the market's expectations of a champion. The market is replete with industry giants who lingered too long to admire their success in the arena, or relaxed their guard, and soon found themselves thrown into the dust like an unfit sumo star.

IBM is still finding its feet after such a fall. As the preeminent leader of the mainframe era, so complete was Big Blue's grip on that market's mind share that it spawned the cliché, "No one was ever sacked for buying IBM." This mastery carried over into the PC industry, where IBM redefined the PC image into its own likeness when it launched its IBM PC in 1981.

However, years of success in maintaining this kind of mind control can lead to the formation of a rigid mindset in the one doing the controlling. And sure enough, IBM exhibited inflexibility in its approach to PCs. Through a series of missteps, such as the ill-considered PC jr., losing out to Compaq in introducing the 386 generation of PCs, and a failed attempt to ditch the de facto AT standard in favor of a proprietary architecture, IBM lost its power over the market's mind share, first to Compaq and others in hardware, then to Microsoft in operating systems.

...and winners

If that's how you lose mind share, Microsoft recently demonstrated in Japan how to win it. For a decade, JustSystem, Japan's leading PC software vendor, dominated Japan's fractured PC market with its Ichitaro word processor software. So complete was the grip on market mind share that every Japanese manufacturer of a proprietary PC system (and that was most vendors) regally courted JustSystem in order to have it write an Ichitaro version for their PCs.

The situation changed dramatically when Microsoft introduced Windows 3.1J, the first Windows version to impact the local market. Owning the operating system naturally gives Microsoft a decisive advantage over other application developers, and it used this advantage to be out the door first with its Japanese language version of Word for Windows.

With users having no other choice in the burgeoning Windows market, MS-Word grabbed early sales for GUI word processors. And when Microsoft later shipped its Office suite of business applications, the combined sales (of stand-alone Word, and Word bundled in Office) saw Word at least equal sales of the Windows version for Ichitaro.

Microsoft repeated this successful formula with the launch of Windows 95 in Japan last November, when it simultaneously shipped 32-bit versions of its key business applications. With no 32-bit version of Ichitaro yet available (as of July 1996) Microsoft now claims a 60% market share with its combined Word sales, decisively breaking JustSystem's lock on the market's mind share.

No one in the PC industry understands the importance of mind share better than Microsoft and Intel. This can be partly explained in that both suffer from self-confessed paranoia when it comes to viewing the competition -- a condition eminently suited to playing the mind games that win and keep mind share.ç

John Boyd is the Tokyo correspondent for InformationWeek and writes the weekly "Computer Corner" column in the Japan Times. His e-mail address is 6840615@mcimail.com.