Clearly, I wasn't up to the challenge -- by game's end, I ranked in the bottom quartile of previous scores. (Hey, at least I was at the top of the bottom quartile.) So I emailed Glass-Husain: What's the best strategy?
His reply: "The key to winning PDA Sim is to think about what each of the three markets best responds to. Do customers care about price, features, or both? Also, you need to determine the right time to remove a product from your portfolio. But I don't want to give everything away here."
He needn't worry about that. Seeking a bit more insight, I checked out a page where PDA Sim posts the top 10 scores and the winners' strategies. There is also a page for the low scores, "because you can learn as much from losing as you can from winning," says Glass-Husain. "And we encourage players to see whether they can 'win' at crashing the company."
Sure enough, there was a player, dubbed "Simpleman," who followed one simplistic strategy: Do anything to please the customer. He priced each handheld at $1. And he racked up $4.4 billion in losses.
Most of the winners were similarly unhelpful ("think deeply"; "experienced with Turkish economy"). But one player, who amassed $2.7 billion in revenues, tumbled to a strategy that clearly worked -- at least for him: "Milk X5 for two years; make X6 expensive and X7 cheap. Voila."
Then again, I damn near killed the company by following almost the exact same strategy.
Whatever. If there is one real-world lesson to be drawn from the virtual world of PDA Sim, it is this: Misread the handheld-computer market, and it's almost impossible to recover -- no matter how relentlessly you slash prices. Hmm ... I wonder whether Yankowski has a day job to go back to?
Bill Breen (bbreen@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor. Learn more about Forio Business Simulations and PDA Sim on the Web.
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