Customer Reviews
Beware, this is not a new book - By: M. Eden, 19 Nov 2007 
I am very much looking forward to getting stuck into this book, but I personallly feel misled by the publication date showing on Amazon & wanted to bring this to the attention of others.
I purchased this book because I was looking for something 'recent' on the topic of strategy. Whilst 2004 is not that recent, I have great respect for M Porter & so was happy that it was recent enough for my purposes.
Unfortunately, upon opening the book, I find that it is a 1980 book on strategy with a 2004 preface.
The content is still good but it kind of defeats the purpose if you are looking for some modern thoughts on & techniques relating to strategy.
Packed With Knowledge! - By: Rolf Dobelli, 17 Sep 2004 
This seminal book is a classic & ought to be read by anyone in business. Michael E. Porter's ideas on competitiveness have lost little relevance despite the fact that he first advanced them in this book in 1980. They have now become so much a part of business practice & business language that one reads the book more with a sense of recognition than a sense of discovery. His prose style is clear & straightforward, albeit somewhat plodding, & the book can tend to repeat itself. However, Porter's clarity is a welcome change from the murk you encounter in many other books on business strategy, & his repetition serves a useful pedagogical purpose. We highly recommend this excellent book. If you're in business, it's relevant.
Figure out why you buy before you buy - By: GentlemenPreferHats, 11 Jun 2004 
This is emphaticallly not a work of strategy & and not a book about strategic analysis. I can't see how this would be practical or useful in a real "hands-on" business environment, although i can see how the more shalllow CEOs may pick up on its buzzwords. Strictly speaking, this is a work of applied classical economics & as such has rigour & intellectual clarity, though some presuppositions seem a bit dodgy & some of the results aren't extended far enough. Recommended for business studies/MBA students.
How Important Are Competitors in Setting Future Strategy? - By: Donald Mitchell, 29 May 2004 Anyone would agree that this book is the best overview of competitive strategy analysis ever written. The strength of the book is a solid outline of subjects & questions to improve your thinking, & get to be a step ahead of the competition. In highly-competitive, commodity businesses, that's usuallly what strategies focus on.
On the other hand, the rapid advances of knowledge & technology mean that the relevant benchmark is perfection, not the competitor, in defining an ideal best practice. In that world, this book has serious limitations, because the competitive dimension is often less important than the customer & user dimension these days.
Any business arena begins, as Peter Drucker so aptly put it, with the task "to create a customer." That reminder is especiallly relevant today when they are so many new ways to serve a customer's needs that no one has ever considered before. The strategic point of 'Blown to Bits' for example is that almost every business will see its vertical value chain (moving from resources through to the customer) broken apart into tiny segments each served by specialists. If you did not begin with that perspective in analyzing the impact of electronicallly-based business practices, you could easily focus on the wrong tasks using this book to create an over-broad strategy focus, rather than concentrating on just a few areas.
I suspect that the applications of Moore's Law & Metcalfe's Law need to be explicitly considered as part of the analysis that Professor Porter is recommending.
A more general weakness in this book is that it assumes that future conditions will be stable enough to draw conclusions about which conditions will be favorable, without giving enough guidance on how to deal with the increasing frequencies & degrees of volatility that we see (in areas like financial markets, commodity prices, the weather, changing customer preferences, & so forth).
Although no book that takes such a narrow focus can help but have weaknesses (like having the podiatrist not notice that you have kidney problems), if you want a good start of how to think about competitors, this is the book for you. Just be sure you keep developing yours strategy with additional dimensions after you finish using this analysis.
If you have read none of Professor Porter's works, this is the one book you should read.
Excellent book for your study - By: , 01 Feb 2004 Most people who buy this book will do so for thier study work. I am undertaking an MBA & this has proven invaluable for the dissertation. Its great to get down to the original text & interpret the theories for yourself.
If you were considering buying this book then consider no longer. It will help you get the grades you need.
