How to Crush Your Competition

How to Crush Your Competition

My friend Karl used to call this the “embrace and extend” theory of competition, and when it works, it’s brilliant.  I just found a new example of it yesterday (thanks, Jack!) that’s very illustrative.

I have been a Firefox user for a couple years now and love the browser and its extensions.  I almost never use Internet Explorer any more — although sometimes I “have to,” because there are a couple of web applications I use that just don’t work well in Firefox, like Outlook Web and online banking.  Hopefully some of that will change over time as Firefox gets more mainstream, but in the meantime, there’s now a Firefox extension that allows you to open certain web pages in Internet Explorer — within Firefox.  I’m not sure how it works technically, and I’m not sure I care, but basically, the new tab that opens with the designated web sites has the little Microsoft “e” as the icon on the tab, and voila — the sites work perfectly using the Internet Explorer engine within Firefox.  So now I never have to open up Internet Explorer again.

Score one for Firefox on the competition front.  How can you apply this kind of competitive framework to your business?

Here’s the link to download the extension, then once it’s installed and you’ve restarted the browser, simply go to the Tools menu and then the IE Tab Options link to add the URLs you need to add.