""The story of how Nomacorc and other stopper upstarts broke the centuries-old cork monopoly is a lesson in how innovation, timing and hustle combined to exploit an opening in a once airtight market. It shows that any dominant industry can be vulnerable to competition, especially if it grows complacent about its position.""
It is a market-oriented cleansing process that is not without costs, however, such as the workers in the out-innovated businesses who lose their jobs. Creative destruction also serves to keep the attention of the dominant industry. They cannot become complacent or a competitor/upstart will chip away at their market dominance.
""Unknown to most American wine drinkers, the plant's owner, Nomacorc LLC, has quietly revolutionized the 400-year-old wine-cork industry. Since the 1600s, wine has been bottled almost exclusively with natural cork, a porous material that literally grows on trees in Portugal, Spain and other Mediterranean lands. But over the past 10 years, an estimated 20% of the bottle stopper market has been replaced by a new technology—plastic corks that cost between 2 and 20 cents apiece. More than one in 10 full-sized wine bottles sold worldwide now come with a Nomacorc plug, while another 9% or so come from other plastic cork makers. Screw caps took another 11% of the market. "We infuriated the cork industry," says Marc Noel, Nomacorc's chairman.""I don't drink wine (or any other alcoholic beverage) so I don't really have an opinion, but I am sure the debate rages among oenophiles (is that the right word?)...But I do love Creative Destruction---gives me warm fuzzies. Such as I would imagine wine would... :)
Related story on the world-wide wine glut..
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