Chapter 23Be prepared to attack, respond, and not respond. Decide what you’re going to defend and what you’re going to let go.

During the first years of Kodak’s inkjet initiative, Big Ink did not attack us. It mostly ignored us, like a gnat flying around its competitive bull. Its approach seemed to be to pay no attention to us and hope that we went away. But small is small only if you are not thinking big, and we had big ideas—and soon we had big results to match.

In Kodak’s first two years battling Big Ink and targeting high-volume inkjet printer users, the company generated gains of 300 to 400 percent. Then again, when you start from zero, you’d better show those kinds of gains! Big Ink could have crushed us then and there, but it laughed us ...

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