Endgame in the Internet Era

Strategies for coping with businesses that face the declining demand of late life-cycle products are revisited in light of the enhanced competitive capabilities made possible by access to the World Wide Web and connectivity to the Internet. Presumably endgame competitors may draw upon a wider variety of implementation options on both the demand and supply sides when serving the highly connected markets reached via Internet access. Results are posited to be mixed since supply-chain activities enhanced by Internet access could extend the long tail of distribution concerning how long demand for obsolete or unfashionable products may endure. Economic exit barriers that prevent competitors from rationalizing excess capacity are reduced, so risk should be lower too. But the Internet milieu makes new entry easier for marginal competitors from lower-wage venues who could use price-cutting tactics to erode the accumulated value of extant firms' brand equity and otherwise negate past investments in product differentiation in ways that will collapse the high profit margins typically enjoyed within well-managed endgame industries. Accordingly, managerial responses for coping with declining demand will differ during the post-Internet era from how firms competed in the pre-Internet era.