Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Main idea
The classic intelligence radar is built by product category: you follow the vendors in the same line of business, you compare feature against feature. The implicit criterion is membership of the same family.
The criterion that counts lies elsewhere: what resonates with the customer's need at the moment they make their choice. Notion is the typical example — it encroaches on project management, document management, tasks, the internal wiki, the knowledge base, without frontally replacing any specialized product. It does not win the comparison; it is enough for the comparison never to take place.
An alternative of this kind is often more dangerous than a direct competitor, precisely because it is absent from radars built by category: it appears in no comparison grid, and its victory takes the form of a project that never happens.
Why it matters
This changes the population to observe, and therefore the structure of the intelligence work: the general-purpose tool already deployed, the spreadsheet, the manual process judged good enough, the internal workaround enter the field on the same footing as a competing vendor.
It also changes how lost deals are read. A deal that closes against nobody — "we'll see later", "we already do that in our own tools" — is usually filed as a commercial non-event, when it in fact names the most effective competitor on the market.
Nuances and limits
Widened without bound, the criterion makes everything a competitor of everything: inaction, budget, another company priority. It stays operative as long as it names something that answers the same need in a way the customer judges sufficient, and stops being so when it merely names the absence of a decision.
And a general-purpose alternative is not fought like a direct competitor: confronting it with a feature grid where it loses does not address the reason it was judged sufficient.
Open questions
- How do you detect a general-purpose alternative that is winning, when it produces neither an identified lost deal nor an explicit comparison?