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Urban Myths: Digital Services and Colorado Rockies
October 17, 2007

In the webinar we offered last week we discussed 3 Digital Urban myths. Another one is known as the “early adopter advantage”. If you’re the first company to provide a service, you have the opportunity to offer something unique—for the time being, anyway—and you gain an immediate market share advantage because of the absence of competition.

Companies that were the first to offer certain digital services were able to create a new market and, at the outset, did have the field to themselves. Lightning Source, for example, was the first to market digitally printed conventional format books; Shutterfly was the first to offer digital picture books. Each used the latest digital printing technology and Web-to-print ordering to create a new product/service that gave them an immediate market lead and helped open a whole new business area.

But if you asked either of these companies if simply being the first kid on the block was the reason for a “sustained success” I know they would say “no”! It does not matter if you’re the first company in your area to adopt a new technology – that advantage is short-lived. In a very short period of time, usually 2 months to 2 years others will see your success and build their own new and sometimes more advanced solutions. If you studied the market today you would find that both Lighting Source and Shutterfly have significant competition, which is challenging them and impacting their growth and profit margins.

In addition, being an early adopter does not in itself ensure success even for the short term; there are numerous examples of early adopters who fail by over-extending themselves financially with expensive new equipment to provide services for which there is not yet a market—or which they do not understand how to market—and ultimately being forced to return the equipment or even go out of business.

One of the conclusions from our research is that leaders are companies that master more then one critical success factors. In this case if you’re a early adopter and good at vertical marketing and have  an operational focus not just on quality but on productivity (speed), then 3 of these together may insure success.

Here is an Urban Myth about the Colorado Rockies baseball team, the numbers 64 and 21 are good luck to them. Before each game the Rockies skipper Clint Hurdle scrawls the number "64," on the Rockies' lineup card, circles the number and carries it near his heart before the game. The significance of number 64 is a story that contains both sadness and hope, and if your faint of heart you may not want to read about it.

The number relates to a 15-year-old sophomore, named Kyle Blakeman from ThunderRidge High School. ThunderRidge is school that is about 30 minutes from where I live with my son who just turned 16 yesterday. Kyle Blakeman was a typical 15-year-old sophomore who loved baseball. One day last summer in a supermarket Kyle ran into Hurdle and they started talking. Both were baseball fans and both were concerned about the Rockies season, which at the time was not looking promising. 

Both were facing challenges. Hurdle had a long history of failure his contract extension on opening day elicited catcalls and his team was struggling as the season was ending. Kyle had much bigger issues - he had a rare form of cancer.

Obviously Hurdle was impressed by the young man and a friendship developed. Immediately after a particularly ugly press conference with badgering questions about a debilitating loss Hurdle met with Kyle across a hospital bed and asked, "Give me something here to take the team some luck. You got a little?"

"Luck? Oh, yeah," Blakeman told the manager. The kid said he had always worn No. 64 on the football field. So Hurdle scribbled "64" on the top of the lineup card he filled out for the very next game at Coors Field, against Washington.

Like the magic we see in movies like Field of Dreams, in the bottom of the ninth inning, with the Rockies trailing by four runs, slugger Matt Holliday smacked a home run to spark a rally. Colorado won 6-5.

"I walked back in the hospital that night with this look on my face, and the nurses and family members are laughing at me, saying: 'What? You didn't think it would work?"' said Hurdle, who arrived past 11 p.m. to deliver the lineup card to his young buddy.

"They didn't win every game after that”, said Joanna Blakeman, Klyes mom “but almost every game.” Last spring, with cancer in remission, Kyle was back in school on the freshman baseball team as a third baseman. But the cancer returned with a vengeance during the summer and in six weeks, Kyle was gone.

On Monday night, at the start of Game 4 of the NLCS, Kyle's sister Macie threw out the first pitch. The family watched from the stands as the Rockies completed the sweep of the Arizona Diamondbacks.  Some call it luck, others say it's a miracle that the Colorado Rockies have won 21 of their last 22 games. The Blakeman family has a different take. They believe Kyle had something to do with it. "His baseball number was 21, and the Rockies have won 21 of 22 games," said Joanna Blakeman. The number 64 was once again at the top of the lineup card.  They won the last game 6 to 4. Urban myth or baseball magic? You decide!

Posted by Howie Fenton on October 17, 2007 | Comments (1)