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competition

THE WAR WITH THE RECORD INDUSTRY KEPT NAPSTER ON the front page of newspapers. But inside the company, Shawn Fanning and his crew spent more time worrying about other threats, many of which most Americans never heard about. The team had good reason to be concerned: Napster was at serious risk from competitors for many months after its inception. It was vulnerable because Shawn's major contribution to the march of technological progress hadn't been a blinding discovery or an invention that could be protected by patent law, though the company would try. Instead, it was a brilliant insight—one that could be copied by others, and was. In that context, Napster's pursuit of rapid growth at any cost made far more sense. If the horde of competitors caught up, Napster would have had far less to bargain with when it finally faced the music, as it were. In the end, Napster dominated the market both because of its damn-the-torpedoes approach and its flawlessly easy-

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