By Geoff Colvin
Publication Date: 2025-12-22 10:33:00
The sudden shift in the industry’s landscape got me thinking about a classic tool for understanding any industry. Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter created the “Five Forces” framework in 1979, and it still stands as a brilliant way to grasp a given industry’s big picture. Note that it’s a way to characterize an industry, not an individual company.
So, for example, the first force, “threat of new entrants,” means, “Is this an industry in which new entrant companies could easily compete, or not?” If the answer is, “This force is weak,” it would mean there is little threat of new entrants coming into that industry, which would be good news for incumbents. We asked expert analysts Charlie Dai of Forrester and Arun Chandrasekaran of Gartner and our own Fortune AI experts for context about how each force might affect Google Gemini and OpenAI.
Force One: Threat of new entrants. Chandrasekaran sees the industry becoming “a three-horse…
