Would you rather be Steve or Bill?

When I put the accompanying quotes (right) side by side, my first thought was that Bill Gates's greatest source of learning is Steve Jobs, and my second thought was that Bill Gates might have more frustrated, disheartened, or enraged customers than any executive in the history of the planet. Indeed, searching out ``the most unhappy" Gates customers would be risky business, as I've seen people using Microsoft products who seem as though they would gladly take Bill Gates out to a field and take baseball bats to him, like the scene with the printer in the movie ``Office Space."

Here's a question: Who would you rather be, Bill or Steve? Richest man in the world, or the guy who created the Apple computer, Pixar Studios, and iPod/iTunes? Here's a more general question: Would you rather be the farmer or the explorer? Most people want to be at the frontier, but few want to spend six months in a Conestoga wagon. And in business, it can take even longer on the frontier, because it keeps jumping around. However, thanks to the work of Ajit Kambil (then of the Stern School at New York University, now at DeLoitte) and his colleagues, I can even explain to you how to draw your very own map of the frontier in your industry.

Kambil calls it a ``value map," and you put ``cost" on the vertical axis of the graph and ``performance" on the horizontal, where ``performance" is defined as the value proposition offered to the customer. Say you were plotting the personal-computer industry; you'd put all the $500 machines on the graph, then the $1,000 ones, and so on. At each price level, there would be a brand farthest to the right, the one with the great performance for that price. That would be one point on the ``frontier." Connect all the right-most dots, and you have a map of the frontier.

One of the things I like about Kambil's logic is that he doesn't define a single ``customer value" -- such as processor speed per cost of the computer -- but has come up with four roles of the customer: buyer, user, cocreator, and transferer. Most companies work only on the ``user" role, figuring out what they do with the product.

A company can, of course, add value to any one of other four customer roles. Amazon.com, for instance, made buying books easier and also provided ``cocreation" in that customers write reviews and thus assist other customers. Ikea added a new point on the frontier map by offering cheap furniture -- well, much of it isn't furniture as much as do-it-yourself furniture kits, but that's a shift in ``cocreation." The role as ``transferer" happens when you make the product easy to dispose of or pass along, as with leased office furniture.

So the goal is to find new ways to add value or new ways to make the old values cheaper. No surprise there. What I like about mapping is the allure of the frontier, the sense of adventure. That's especially true when we reverse those old maps of the world where dragons, monsters, and hippogriffs lurked beyond the borders. Unlike those maps, where the great danger loomed ahead, it's just the reverse with the value frontier in business, where the monsters come along behind. If you're not among the fastest-moving along on the edge, you're already dead; the monsters of the free market just haven't finished digesting you.

Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com.