As for co-branding, cabs are advertising platforms, recommendation engines when the drivers take “DriveOla” from clubs for deliving patrons, and they participate in a vast value chain relative to various experiential products. Can a cab interface better with airlines? Can a cab enhance a travel experience with its hotel, lodging, and entertainment partners? Sure. All of it co-branding.

There is always a value-chain. There are always co-branding opportunities.

And, if you are not fostering an ecology, a value-cahin, user generated content, viral product, viral messaging, …. Oh, well.

“It’s a rainy night in the city that sleeps, and here I am groggy from my nap in the cab from the airport and that painful red eye. Fred, you gotta card? Is your website on it?….Good. “MyCabbie.com,” I’ll leave you a recommendation. Keep the change.”

As your product evolves, you foster complementors in terms of technology extensions, product extensions, content provision. By foster, you might sponsor a marketing component and pay for. This to encourage third-parties. Similarly technical evangelism. Beyond that you reach an ever increasing range of technology providers, such as say MS SQL, Oracle, …. You don’t do everything. All of these people constitute your value chain.

Once you become a SaaS operation, you can use n-tiering to work with other SaaS vendors to provide ALL the functionality your customers might need. Online banks typically use Check-Free to provide a customer-driven check ordering capability. You don’t write that stuff yourself. You leverage others.

In a value chain, you want to occupy the top slot and make the most money off of the transactions, but you definately split the experience across the vendors in your value chain. If they don’t succeed, neither do you.

A more realistic approach is to occupy the position that is focused on the capabilities of your company. This even if you don’t take the most money. The point here is that it costs you less in terms of investment in your business.

Addressability as mentioned in my prior point is to code using a vendor that provides a co-marketing program, so it costs you less to reach an established market. So if you use MS Access, you would use Microsoft’s 3rd party developer marketing program to reach the MS Access install base.

You might, later, support Oracle and use a similar program provided by Oracle. Market leading vendors usually have co-marketing programs.

When you say “addressed by your value chain” – what do you mean?

If you built your product on top of MS Access, you can address that market easily enough, but that installation requirement becomes a barrier. Eventually, you will need to sublimate MS Access. Your Access customers won’t ask for this. They may still appreciate it, because your refactored application should make MS Access or any other database easier to deal with for its users.

Global markets also present addressibility opportunities. Globalization, internationalization, and localization need to be addressed by your value chain. Localization in particular can be left to the distributor in the local market.