Can you imagine a car without a steering wheel and wiper blades, a Personal Computer without a keyboard, monitor, Operating System, and disk drive or a networking protocol besides Ethernet in the Local Area Network equipment? Of course not, because these technical features or attributes have come to define or describe their respective products. Underlying this simple observation is the powerful concept of dominant design. Simply put, dominant design is a single architecture that establishes dominance in a product class. It is the architecture that once established, competitors and innovators must adhere to if they want to command significant market following.

Dominant design is usually established after a period of market shake out of alternative technologies or architectures. Prior to the establishment of dominant design, competing product architectures vie for adoption by consumers in the marketplace, and dominant design is the one that wins its allegiance. Normally, it takes the form of a new product or set of features synthesized from individual technological innovations introduced independently in prior designs or in prior product variances.

Why is the dominant design concept so important? It turns out that broad adoption of a new product by the market at-large increases rapidly after the emergence of the dominant design.

Unit volumes and profitability for the dominant architecture peaks as alternative architectures drop off and the cost of sales for the dominant architecture drops significantly.

Consider the case of digital music download industry. Apple was neither the first one to introduce the MP3 player (that distinction goes to Eiger labs, I believe) nor the one to introduce the concept of music download or sharing (that distinction, I feel goes to Napster). Apple's contribution was in creating the dominant architecture for downloading music, which happens to include a very elegantly designed MP3 player, clever and simple to use iTunes software and a very robust music download service. The rest is history, as witnessed by the Apple's resurgence as a dominant force in consumer electronics.