The Dip: The extraordinary benefits of knowing when to quit (and when to stick)

by Seth Godin

Microsoft does it. They’ve built so many relationships and established so many standards that it’s essentially inconceivable that someone will challenge Word or Excel—at least until the platform changes. Intuit made it through the Dip, though, and now their Quicken accounting software is just as secure as Word is as a word processor. Make it through the competition’s barriers and you get to be king for a while. “But wait!” you say. “Isn’t Google going hard after Micro -soft by creating Web-based versions of spreadsheets and word processors?” Yes. But even mighty Google knows that they can’t do that without changing the platform (from the PC to the Web). Microsoft has constructed a Dip so deep and so expensive that it’s impossible to cross. But now, with a new platform, Google has a much easier path to follow. Apple’s done the same thing with iTunes and the iPod.