competitive tool

Restaurants, health clubs, banquet service and meeting spaces have become more serious competitive tools.

Since then, vintage reports have become competitive tools.

For this reason, increasing numbers of companies are looking for other, more enduring, competitive tools - such as brands.

Paying compensation in the event of overbooking is, in principle, a competitive tool just like all other competitive tools.

Whatever their motivation, large airlines have a number of competitive tools at their disposal that have the effect of isolating small rivals.

Large companies have used these private data networks as powerful competitive tools to streamline their procurement and distribution, curbing inventories, cutting prices and lifting profits.

Furthermore, to the extent that HMOs make their contracting decisions based on beneficiary hospital preferences, perceptions of quality are important competitive tools.

One reason for the relative strength of their contributions, merchants say, is that after devastating years of liquidations and bankruptcies, they are using their good-will dollars as competitive tools.

"They have the competitive tools within the current labor contracts to do the job," said Roy Freundlich, a spokesman for the US Airways branch of the pilots union.

Intellectual property privateering most commonly occurs as outsourcing of corporate patent portfolios but can also be applied as one of a corporation's competitive tools and may involve high degrees of stealth.

Companies have increasingly employed intellectual property rights as competitive tools since the early 1980s, frequently with the goal of extracting value directly from their own IPRs whether from licensing revenue or litigation rewards.

Brokerage houses, however, have resorted to suits to try to prevent successful brokers from moving to competitors, and, in high technology and other scientific industries, such suits may become competitive tools to help a company keep its edge - or to blunt others.

If you're interested in running applications, Virtual PC 2004 (Microsoft; US$129) and VMware Workstation 4.5 (VMware; US$189 to download, US$199 with packaging) are both competitive tools for the job.