Dots don't always connect in a discernible way, or maybe it needs Steve Jobs of sorts to connect them. It has been a forest for me, of independent, distinct dots. Like the planets of solar system, they might have some universal gravitational influence on others but they definitely don't connect in any big way. They do their own circles( or ellipses if you prefer). Gravitation however is universal and sometimes - you see it assert itself.
We had lost two games before gravitation struck. The first one lost economizing on the limited paintballs we had, and the second, defending from badly selected bunkers we'd chosen as posts.
Paintball must be familiar to most. According to wiki it is a team game "in which players compete, in teams or individually, to eliminate opponents by hitting them with pellets containing paint (referred to as a paintball) from a a special gun called a paintball marker".
Continuous firing from other side had us all painted and we were tired and exhausted. Our muscles had given up and the pull of the earth was never more apparent. It pulls with quite some force, and yes it sucked - quite literally.
Another team was resting, waiting to take us on. Two more to go and elimination seemed quite likely, clearly it was not working for us. Leaning on the grass i looked around, it reminded me of AOE(age of empires) i used to play on my desktop and i must have smiled or was it a smug, i don't remember. Nostalgia is like childhood, you can always relate to it however alien it might be to you now. Like the history of an era gone by, whether with triumph or not, it never fails to please. It always leaves you slightly high. In the game of AOE one starts with building villagers and farming until you're poised to build military units and attack. A brilliant digression from this progression of play is - The Early Attack, where you take your villagers and make them fight like martyrs, if you have the number advantage you stand a fair chance. That was the epiphanic moment, that was it, we had a strategy, gravitation had struck from above.
Those were the two dots, but hey isn't the connection inherent, after all they're just two games with similar motifs? Ahem, ahem.. so much for hogwash.
There however is another game, the game of corporations, big businesses and strategic consulting. This dot is about ABC corp, a company which makes products catering from budget to luxury segment in the merchandise category. When ABC started it was aware that there was a powerful brand existing in the market and it would be very difficult for it to bite into the luxury class of the product line. A largely engineering driven mid-sized organization the only strategic advantage ABC had was a dozen patents it owned. ABC's products at that time could be categorized somewhere between the best luxury class and the regular but somewhat different from competing brands. In todays markets many a times you get one shot, which either make or break the company. ABC promised an upcoming product launch in the luxury segment and cleverly floated an advertisement that not only did brand building but at the same time enticed the regular segment customer's dreams. Just prior to the scheduled launch, instead of the proposed luxury model it flooded the market with derivatives of the regular models. Although lacking a few features these regular models almost mimicked the luxury model. It was an instant hit, the market was flooded with ABC's regular segment products with more models than any other brand could offer at that time. The luxury model was delayed and never mass produced. It aggressively marketed and invested in the regular category and within a year it had 62% of the market share.
Moral of the three dot story is - gravitation is a very confusing topic, so when i doubt dont think, just run like crazy. You can always come back later and connect the dots.
