Johnik, of course I get all that......guess the unspoken point is you just have to be more than a single egg that makes or breaks you if someone else happens to know it also......you have to be BETTER in some manner, even if it is just reputation.....
now, for example, the much mentioned "trademarked" colas are nothing special......wise people also know that, come on.......it's just the way the Cos decided to handle their property......I could have the formulas to all of them in my hand, would it matter????.....nope, because those Cos have wisely invested in a long term reason for customers to chose them, since they know the uniqueness of their recipes is not special, when it comes down to it......so they create a market where it is (for better or worse, that's how it works)....same for fried chicken, secret hamburger sauce, or any "trademarked" product, which is basically name-recognition-equity and loyalty.....
moving into the tech IPs, it can be a mixture of perception and method (ex: "Intel Inside")....anyway, think we are on the same page, just that it is simplistic for some to proclaim that a very valuable yet information-content-small piece of "data" (encoded in a molecule), that is distributed to factories with 2 low/average payed people, with plans to be all over the globe, land and sea, etc, etc, will stay very secret by automatic sensors and legal contract threats......one rogue employee, that's it, genie is out of the bottle.....it may not matter though, and I never did say someone else would outperform JBII if they did have it......just that if it IS that profitable, they will likely try (as the huge amount of legal IP disputes show, over and over, for Cos big and small).....
so, it comes down to, "What makes JBII different"????.....if the prime answer is the secrecy of the catalyst, doubt that will cut it though......secrets don't last long, but improved methodology (innovation) and marketing do........
PS: it is my opinion that the catalyst is already mostly "marketing", and not that unique, just by the nature of it's "discovery".....I also question this because of the fact that it is claimed to be something that is still so useful after so much modification (removing the "nasties")......so, what is to stop someone else from modifying such a versatile compound???
