The Gorilla Game: Picking Winners in High Technology (Hardcover)

Finding the next Microsoft has been the Holy Grail for many investors. However, anyone who has dabbled in technology stocks can't help but be dismayed at their extreme volatility--it's not unusual for tech stocks to gain or lose 10 to 20 percent in a single day. So how can you win in this market and find the next Cisco, Intel, or Oracle? The key to winning, says bestselling author Geoffrey Moore, is to play the "gorilla game."

Moore's previous two books, Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, are the bibles for many marketing professionals and product managers. In these books, Moore describes the life cycle common to the successful adoption of technology products and pinpoints moments in the cycle, for example, "the chasm," the "bowling alley," and the "tornado," where products can either flourish or fade away. In The Gorilla Game, Moore takes these concepts, with the help of coauthors Paul Johnson and Tom Kippola, and applies them to the task of finding gorilla stocks--ones that dominate their market niches. The book looks at how the market values technology stocks and provides case studies of markets where gorillas have been born. Moore and his coauthors put their ideas to the test in the final chapter and pick a portfolio of stocks that they believe have the potential to become winners in the gorilla game. The result is a highly perceptive investment guide that anyone who's a fan of Moore's earlier work will find exciting and profitable. This revised edition, published a year and a half after the first, includes a new chapter on valuing Internet stocks. --Harry C. Edwards

Each year at least one author comes out with a book touting investment opportunities in high-technology stocks. A recent example was Michael Murphy's Every Investor's Guide to High-Tech Stocks and Mutual Funds (1997). Moore's is the early entry this year. He is chairman of a Silicon Valley consulting firm that specializes in marketing strategy, and he has written two books about marketing high-tech products, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers (1991) and Inside the Tornado: Marketing Strategies from Silicon Valley's Cutting Edge (1995). Here he turns his attention to the elements that turn companies into "gorillas," those firms that overwhelmingly dominate their markets, such as Microsoft and Cisco. With his marketing insights, Moore examines what it is small companies do to grow into gorillas; and he advises how to spot these companies before their stock prices soar. He uses Oracle and Cisco as case studies, and he suggests that two areas in which to search out future gorillas are the Internet and customer service software. David Rouse --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"Eight hundred pounds of good investment advice! I wish I had had this book and its investment philosophy twenty years ago." -- Sandy Robertson, chairman, Robertson Stephens Divisionof BancBoston Robertson Stephens

"High-tech is a particularly treacherous area for investors. The Gorilla Game gives investors a powerful framework within which to develop investment strategies." -- Alfred R. Berkeley III, president, The Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc.

"If you have more than a passing interest in high-tech investing, you ought to find this an indispensable and highly readable guide...It also provides a conservative, risk-averse framework for buying and selling these stocks based on fundamental changes in the marketplace." -- Motley Fool

"There are many high-quality books on technology markets and many on finan-cial markets. However, The Gorilla Game is the first book to accurately bridge both disciplines. The combination is potent. Do not invest in tech stocks with-out reading The Gorilla Game." -- Bill Gurley, partner, Benchmark Capital

"This new book is a must-read for growth investors...These authors bring to the game an unusual combination of credentials--practical and successful investing, academic experience, and consulting work with some of the largest tech firms. So they have been able to summarize and explain the essence of technology investing better than any other attempt we have seen." -- Smart Money

The Possibilities Are Staggering:

• Had you invested $10,000 in Cisco Systems back in early 1990, your investment would now be worth $3,650,000

• Similarly, a $10,000 investment made in Microsoft in 1986 would be valued at more than $4,721,000 today

• $10,000 invested in Yahoo! in 1996 would today be worth $317,000

How do you get in on those deals--especially if you're not a Silicon Valley insider? How do you buy the high-tech win-ners and avoid the losers? How do you find the Yahoo!s, Microsofts, and Ciscos of tomorrow?

The answers are here, in this newly revised edition of the national bestseller The Gorilla Game. The book reveals the dynamics driving the market for high-tech stocks and out-lines the forces that catapult a select number of compa-nies to "gorilla" status--dominating the markets they serve in the way that Yahoo! dominates internet portals, Microsoft dominates software operating systems, and Cisco dominates hardware for data networks.

Follow the rules of The Gorilla Game and you will learn how to identify and invest in the "gorilla candidates" early on--while they are still fighting for dominance, and while their stocks are still cheap. When the dust clears and one company clearly attains leadership in its market, you'll reap the enormous returns that foresighted investors in high-tech companies deserve.

This new edition of The Gorilla Game has been updated and revised throughout, with new focus and new insights into choosing the internet gorillas--the companies that are destined to dominate internet commerce.

Bestselling author Geoffrey A. Moore is one of the world's leading consultants in high-tech marketing strategy. Here you'll find his groundbreaking ideas about tech-nology markets that made his previous books bestsellers, combined with the work of Paul Johnson, a top Wall Street technology analyst, and Tom Kippola, a high-tech consul-tant and highly successful private investor. Together they have discovered and played the gorilla game and now give readers the real rules for winning in the world of high-tech investing.

Step by step you'll learn how to spot a high-tech market that is about to undergo rapid growth and development, how to identify and spread investments across the potential gorillas within the market, and how to narrow your investments to the single, emerging leader--the gorilla--as the market matures.

High-tech investing can be extremely risky, but investors who learn to play the gorilla game can avoid many of the traps and pitfalls and instead start capitalizing on untold profits. Personal wealth is only a gorilla game away.

Geoffrey Moore is a Managing Director with The Chasm Group, a consulting practice based in California that provides market development and business strategy services to many leading high-technology companies. He is also a Venture Partner with Mohr Davidow Ventures, a California-based venture capital firm specializing in specific technology markets, including e-commerce, internet, enterprise software, networking and semiconductors. As a Venture Partner at Mohr Davidow, he provides market strategy advice to their high-tech portfolio companies. Geoffrey is a frequent speaker and lecturer at industry conferences and his books are required reading at Stanford, Harvard, MIT and other leading business schools.

Geoffrey's current practice focuses on the concepts of his recent book Living on the Fault Line, targeted to CEO's and senior executives of Fortune 500 companies facing the impact of the Internet.Geoffrey's first book, Crossing the Chasm, initially published in 1991, adds compelling new extensions to the classical model of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. He introduces his readers to a gap or "chasm" that innovative companies and their products must cross in order to reach the lucrative mainstream market. A revised edition was released in July 1999 to update industries and case-study companies.

The sequel, Inside the Tornado, published in 1995, provides readers with insight into how to capitalize on the potential for hypergrowth beyond the chasm. This second book sorts out how the market forces behind the Technology Adoption Life Cycle demand the need for radical shifts in market strategy.

The Gorilla Game, Geoffrey's third book, was originally released in March of 1998 with a revised version, including a new chapter on internet investing, released August of this year. This book was co-authored with Chasm Group managing partner and high-tech marketing strategist Tom Kippola, and stock investment guru and BancAmerica Robertson Stephens analyst Paul Johnson. The Gorilla Game combines the methodology Moore introduced in Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, with Johnson's stockmarket valuation models and Wall Street expertise, and Kippola's high-tech investment experience.

Geoffrey's most recent book, Living on the Fault Line, focuses on a single theme: How should the management of a public company that rose to prominence prior to the age of the Internet manage for shareholder value now that the Internet is upon us? Living on the Fault Line guides executives and managers who are coping with disruptive technology, destabilizing their core market positions, providing them with new models, metrics, and organizational practices to meet the challenges of the new economy.

Prior to founding The Chasm Group in 1992, Geoffrey was a principal and partner at Regis McKenna, Inc., a leading high-tech marketing strategy and marketing communications company. For the decade prior, he was a sales and marketing executive at three different software companies.

Geoffrey holds a bachelor's degree from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, both in literature, and served as an English professor at Olivet College.