Does a business win when its competitor loses? Absolutely

I'll agree at some point market share is a zero-sum game where one should squash or at least keep down competitors. On the other hand there are many evolving markets where it can be helpful to have other companies pushing the product. As example think about cell phones. If there were only one provider and said provider made the phones very expensive (same profit, less work) then the cell phone market would have not grown to its current ubiquitous use. But having choices via competition has brought on an explosion of phones to the point where everyone benefits. The competition may be rough but I suspect that AT&T, Verizon, et.al. are making good enough profits. But then I come from an university research-based background where we compete for grants and other funding but also build on the shoulders of other peoples' work.

Westerman,

You're confusing what's good for the individual company and what's good for the industry. In the cell phone example, having multiple vendors has likely been good for the industry as a whole - though that's not obvious in parts of the world that have ubiquitous mobile phones in the presence of a monopoly or near monopoly. But an executive at AT&T is coveting every Sprint customer, and vice versa - it is not good for AT&T for Sprint to gain share, or even maintain it.

In rapidly expanding markets companies can have the luxury of growing volume while not growing share. This is not sustainable - a company that loses share will, eventually, lose volume as well.

wow - there is so much wrong with your supposition about market share i don't know where to start. If markets were finite (as you claim) we'd all long be dead of starvation. Maybe you got wrapped up in a self-fulfilling tautology. And the baseball analogy isn't useful either.

Like KevinH said, there is so much wrong in this piece, it is hard to know where to start. One key concept, however, is that driving any business decision off of a single indicator (I.E. market share) is in and of itself foolish.

On a more fundamental level the whole attitude, "Every market is finite. That makes market share a zero-sum game." is the seductive error. Is is so comfortable to over simplify to the point of believing that statement. Which by the way is patently false. ALL markets are complex enough that a zero-sum equilibrium is not even a valid concept.

May I suggest a little study of the work of John Nash.

A colleague pointed out that I may have been excessively terse.

1st, he insisted I revel that I am not anti-competitive, quite the opposite he considers me a cut-throat competitor. The pertinence of that is not wholly clear to me.

But more importantly, (from my view), is he insists few will recognize the significance of the Nash reference. Suffice it to say, Nash is well known for his work in game theory. Now given that the theory of zero-sum games is vastly different from that of non-zero-sum games (game theory 101), the danger in describing something as zero-sum, that is in fact not, lies in that no action taken will have the effect one would expect. This is true because an optimal solution can always be found for a zero-sum-game, but not so in the non-zero-sum realm. Nash's equations provide some techniques for dealing with the complexity of non-zero-sum games.

Summary: Business is complex. Over simplification leads to error.

Stick with IT, Bob. Markets aren't defined by the "six billion." Or the 220 million. Ever look at a historical chart of US auto sales? Notice how they increased year over year? Your 220 divide by 6 doesn't quite hold water. Ever hear of luxury markets for autos? hybrid-car markets? small-car markets? These increase the dimension of a simple formula like 220 divide by 6. Markets grow. Again, you're stuck in a tautology. Indeed, everything is finite, eventually and ultimately. But that's a foolhardy way to base any marketing (or competitive) strategy.

I have to disagree. I would say that it is generally a close to zero sum game. It is difficult to make business competition a positive sum game especially on any long term basis. But it generally is easy to make it a negative sum game where you lose market share, not to a competitor, but completely eliminate it from the market. One of the fastest ways to do this is to produce a bad product. Generally people frequently don't then shop for a good one, they just stop using that type of product. A cell phone company which advertises service in an area and doesn't have it, generally will keep people from trying any other company which sells in their area. Bad customer service will also cause a drop in market. Usually that takes two companies. People who deal with the first set of bad customer service will say that someone else has to do better and will shop around. But if that company drops the ball they are gone.