Abstract
Strategies for coping with businesses that face the declining demand of late life-cycle products are
revisited in light of the enhanced competitive capabilities made possible by access to the World
Wide Web and connectivity to the Internet. Presumably endgame competitors may draw upon a
wider variety of implementation options on both the demand and supply sides when serving the
highly-connected markets reached via Internet access. Results are posited to be mixed since supply-
chain activities enhanced by Internet access could extend the long tail of distribution concerning
how long demand for obsolete or unfashionable products may endure. Economic exit barriers that
prevent competitors from rationalizing excess capacity are reduced, so risk should be lower too. But
the Internet milieu makes new entry easier for marginal competitors from lower-wage venues who
could use price-cutting tactics to erode the accumulated value of extant firms’ brand equity and
otherwise negate past investments in product differentiation in ways that will collapse the high profit
margins typically enjoyed within well-managed endgame industries. Accordingly, managerial
responses for coping with declining demand will differ during the post-Internet era from how firms
competed in the pre-Internet era.