text: Thankfully, this is NOT littered with platitudes and meaningless anaologies, the hallmarks of 99% of the latest-and-greatest business books. Especially since it was written in 1999, Moore's is an incredibly insightful and prophetic book on strategy for the high-tech industry. He was predicting cutting edge changes then that are coming into reality today in 2005. The book is much more descriptive than prescriptive though, and is best used as a tool to instigate discussions about corporate strategy, rather than as a checklist for strategic implementation. 
  
  I help run an online software development company and although it isn't exactly "high tech" I still found the vast majority of it very helpful and the rest of it fascinating. Market shifts are demanding broadband wireless Internet everywhere--free. Companies are shifting towards web-basing software applications. All very relevant to my business.
  
  The book is well written, an easy and moderately fast read, and very accessible by anyone who is technology-savvy enough to at least hold an email address. Yes, buy it. Buy the paperback and save money.
  
  Short Synopsis:  In the infancy of a market, products need to be highly tailored to meet the psychological and technical needs of leading edge techno-geeks; nothing new here. When a company wants to take that product and make it marketable to the middle majority--where the biggest money sits--it requires a commitment to discipline and shift its strategy in order to do so. The emphasis shifts intially to identifying a single niche segment and creating a comprehensive, tailored product, that meets all of their needs--create the "whole product" by using partners and 3rd party services to patchwork the thing together. Then, stop tweaking the product. If that works, pick related niches and go after them the same way, creating the "whole product" for each of them. Once people at large are comfortable enough to make the paradigm shift for that market (this all deals with new, high-tech changes) and start doing so en masse, the strategy must completely shift again to a ship-first / fix-the-product-later mentality in a mad, market share scramble. At this phase, you are "In the Tornado." Lots of examples of successful and abysmal strategies used by high tech companies whose names are familiar to everyone, at each stage mentioned above.
  
  