This book is a case study in industrial economics, using the
computing industry as a base at a time when it was undergoing
drastic changes. The objective was to identify and analyze those
major forces and mechanisms which account for the evolution of an
industry. The approach is to recognize the diversity of enterprises
and to explore the interplay between products, production processes
and the characteristics of enterprises, including their
organization and management systems, which business experience
indeed shows can be decisive competitive advantages or
disadvantages. One might expect the analysis of competitive
processes to be readily available in the economic literature, but
most economists treat firms as black boxes, ignoring their
differences. Beyond providing the basic concepts and mechanisms,
mainstream economics are of little help here, since their
fundamental paradigms of competition and equilibrium all but ignore
the real-world notions of enterprise, differentiation and
competition. To understand the internal working of enterprises, one
has to turn to the so-called "management" literature, which
unfortunately most often stops at the border of the enterprise and
seldom tackles the interplay between internal choices and the
workings of the market. The separation of those two disciplines is
an essential weakness when considering the subject of this book.
Economic theory uses too schematic a view of the firm, and
organizational theory has too little concern for the market
environment. This book attempts to combine those two strands of
thought into one theory of industrial structure. Its subject, one
particular industry, is limited enough for theory to be always
confronted with the experience of the business professional. At the
same time, that subject is comprehensive enough to allow moving
beyond a pure monograph and to support the beginnings of new
conceptual developments. The same approach and concepts could prove
useful in the analysis of other complex industries, and perhaps
form a starting point for more general contributions to research
into industry structures. This book was originally written in
French and published in 1996, based on research done in 1994/1995
and on the statistics available at that time. The author translated
it into English, but the French publisher could not find an
English-language counterpart. The French version is now out of
print and the publisher has renounced the rights. New publishing
techniques, including print on demand, now allow an independent
publisher to make a book available in printed form with a minimal
investment. The world has changed since the book was written, most
notably computers and the computing industry. There have been giant
advances in microelectronics and in their applications to all walks
of life. Many firms and products have disappeared, and many new
have emerged. Many catch-phrases are now obsolete; new ones are now
popular. Also, the easily accessible industry statistics that I
used have been discontinued. Updating the book to 2013 would
involve a complete rewrite and extensive additional research. But I
happen to believe that the approach and concepts put forward in
1996 are still worth publishing in their original state. Concerning
the analytical approach and the conclusions, I leave it to the
reader to evaluate which are obsolete and which are still valid
today. Concerning the predictions that I ventured at the time on
the basis of that analysis, it turns out that they did materialize
to a large extent. At any rate, the factual part, i. e. the history
and the industry statistics in the period 1950-1995, may still be
of interest as far as it goes. Be that as it may, I urge the reader
to constantly keep in mind that the book was written in 1995, using
data available at that time, relying on the technologies of the
time and on whatever literature I was able to lay my hands on. In
the context of this book, "today" must always be understood as "in
1995."
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