GCA’s customer service atrophied. The company’s attitude, one analyst recounted, was “buy what we build and don’t bother us.” The company’s own employees admitted that “customers got fed up.” This was the attitude of a monopolist—but GCA was no longer a monopoly. After Greenberg stopped buying Nikon lenses, the Japanese company decided to make its own stepper. It acquired a machine from GCA and reverse engineered it. Soon Nikon had more market share than GCA.
