Which company are you?

In the fight between the big four com­pa­nies in the tech world (Apple, Google, Face­book, and Microsoft), we are see­ing the emer­gence of dif­fer­ent styles. A new gen­er­a­tion of com­pa­nies is now look­ing to emu­late these mod­els at a much smaller level, break­ing our indus­try down around four arche­types: the refiner, the tin­kerer, the pusher, and the anchor-weight.

• The attacher is gen­er­ally a com­pany with a suc­cess­ful prod­uct. The com­pany then tries to attach every­thing it does to that prod­uct, even­tu­ally los­ing out as the mar­ket evolves.
• The pusher finds the edge, goes beyond it and, when the inevitable push-back hap­pens, pulls back a lit­tle. Hav­ing pushed beyond the edge, it starts the cycle again.
• The tin­kerer cre­ates prod­ucts through exten­sive user test­ing and trust the data reli­giously, tin­ker­ing with the prod­uct based on what the data says.
• The refiner looks at a prod­uct cat­e­gory and offers an improved prod­uct by cut­ting back instead of adding.

Each of these mod­els pro­vides value to the mar­ket but ulti­mately, the best com­pa­nies might be the ones that are will­ing to take on all of those fea­tures depend­ing on time and con­text. In the fol­low­ing entries, I will go into details as to each of those mod­els, pro­vid­ing exam­ple of lead­ers and star­tups that fol­low them.