Marketing requires investment
Technology, no matter how great or innovative, does not make a product successful. Marketing is the key. A mediocre product with good marketing will always beat a great technology with mediocre marketing. The Microsoft operating system is not the market leader because it is superior to UNIX or Linux, but because Microsoft is a superior marketing company. Intel beat down the Alpha chip not on the basis of superior technology but because of the $100 million "Intel Inside" marketing program (possibly the greatest example of market leadership ever). If good technology won the war, then everyone would have a Macintosh on their desktop. Every survey produced on the value of marketing (Advertising Council, Centre for Public Relations, Colombia University, to name a few) indicates that companies that spend 10 percent of their revenues on marketing lead their industries. Those same surveys show that successful technology companies spend a maximum of five percent of their revenues...