It dawned on me the other day that there are a whole host of ecosystems that spring up around a particular product and consist of viable companies, all in existence because of another company.
What made me come to this realization is that my wife just recently bought the kids Crocs, kind of for their birthday, but mainly because they did not have any shoes that fit them anymore (I know, shame on us). I am sure you have seen those silly little things that people have on their Crocs, they are called Jibitz, that’s right, Jibitz (my kids love them by the way). The company that manufactures these have built a business off of Crocs and as far as I know, those are the only shoes that they work with. They are cute and trendy, but what would happen to Jibitz if Crocs were no longer seen as cool, could they adapt?
There are other products out there that have ecosystems around them, two of the most notable are MySpace and Apple’s iPod. With MySpace, it runs the gambit from web sites that offer thousands of themes, to one could argue YouTube (I mean, they did get their start thanks to MySpace). Same thing goes for the iPod, there are hundreds of companies out there hawking their goods for the iPod from docking stations to covers and fm transmitters. All of these companies arguably owe most of their existence to the company in which they built their business off of.
So what happens to the ecosystem if the company or product that is holding it all together drops in popularity or even worse, no longer exists? Do these companies close up shop or do they move on and find the next company / product to latch onto?
In nature, this type of thing happens everyday. The cleaner fish and the shark are a great example of one of nature’s ecosystems.