The Marketing Playbook was written by Richard Tong & John Zagula, where they distilled lessons from their years at Microsft and how they helped Microsoft Office and Windows grow from a 10 percent market share to 90 percent market share. This book is expecially useful for succeeding in the ultra-competitve technology business landscape.

Highlights from the book:

"Every company needs to figure out the best way to beat the competition. What do you do if the other guy is already dominating the market? Should you challenge them head on or lie low for a while? Should you offer your customers high-end features or a low-end price? Or both?

The Five basic marketing strategies:
1. The Drag Race. This is the scenario you think of when you think of competition. Microsoft Word versus Word Perfect. Visa versus Mastercard. There are two players and you both solve the same problem in pretty much the same way. Drag races are very expensive money wise and time wise. A lot of people think that GNOME/Linux are in a drag race against Windows. I’d argue that we aren’t going to win that way.
In the Drag Race, the main player is the salesperson. In an all out competition it’s about convincing people you are the best, whether it’s more features, faster, better, whatever-better than the other guy.

2. The Platform Play. This is the play for the company that won the drag race. They keep potential competitors away by making them into partners. Think Amazon.com and all the brands they sell within their store. Amazon makes it easy for those potential competitors to be their partners.
In the Platform Play it’s all about business development because you are trying to build an ecosystem of partnerships.

3. The Stealth Play. This play is about identifying and targeting a couple of niche markets and becoming really good at them. Then you can either take over the whole market one niche at a time or you can grow until you can win a drag race. I think this is where GNOME/Linux should go. There are niches that we are well suited for like users with accessibility needs, netbooks, mobile, … You don’t have to do lots of PR and adverting in this mode. You want to stay some what quiet and just talk to people in the niches you’ve identified. It’s not about sitting back though – you have to be one step ahead of the big guy (the one that’s won the drag race) in each of the niches you are targeting. The goal of this play is to eventually move to one of the other plays.
In the Stealth Play it’s all about the CEO. It’s about dedication, patience, long-term plays, staying flexible and motivated. That takes lots of leadership.

4. The Best-of-Both Play. This play is about defining a whole new offering. Think of the car industry when Japan had cheap cars and Germany had luxury cars. Toyota decided to market a “Japanese luxury car”, an oximoron at the time. This is the personal computer – somewhere between a calculator and a mainframe. This play is about the product (a whole new offering) and marketing (you have to tell everyone about it.)
In the Best-of-Both Play, it’s the product team. It’s really your product that will win this strategy.

5. The High-Low Play. This play is for someone who dominates the high end or the low end, or both, and is trying to compete with someone coming out with a best-of-both worlds product. You tell your customers that compromise, a product that meets the low-end and the high-end, can’t possibly work and you market your low end and high end products agressively. It’s a temporary play – the book recommends that you actually develop your own best-of-both products while you keep the competition from winning by critisizing their best-of-both product. This play is all marketing. (And in this play, the marketing they were suggesting definitely felt like lying!)
In the High-Low Play it’s all about marketing. You’re trying to convince people that two very opposite products are both the best without confusing them. So you need to define both in a way that doesn’t compete with the other and market each one to the right audience

[From the Great Books Series. Also see The Success Manual  - Encyclopedia of Advice, which contains summaries of 100+ Most useful books.]