Rating: 
Summary: Timeless Classic
Review: A classic work on business strategy. Despite the fact that the businesss world has evolved significantly, the competitive strategy described in the book is still perfectly applicable, and the book is highly comprehensive.
Rating:
Summary: A must have for beginners
Review: A must have. Porter provides students with a great place to start for understanding strategy. While you must know the basics in this book to understand the foundation of strategy,it will not provide you with a dynamic and cutting edge strategic framework that many of today's industries need.
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Summary: How Important Are Competitors in Setting Future Strategy?
Review: Anyone would agree that this book is the best overview of competitive strategy analysis ever written. The strength of the book is a solid outline of subjects and questions to improve your thinking, and get to be a step ahead of the competition. In highly-competitive, commodity businesses, that's usually what strategies focus on. On the other hand, the rapid advances of knowledge and technology mean that the relevant benchmark is perfection, not the competitor, in defining an ideal best practice. In that world, this book has serious limitations, because the competitive dimension is often less important than the customer and user dimension these days. Any business arena begins, as Peter Drucker so aptly put it, with the task "to create a customer." That reminder is especially relevant today when they are so many new ways to serve a customer's needs that no one has ever considered before. The strategic point of 'Blown to Bits' for example is that almost every business will see its vertical value chain (moving from resources through to the customer) broken apart into tiny segments each served by specialists. If you did not begin with that perspective in analyzing the impact of electronically-based business practices, you could easily focus on the wrong tasks using this book to create an over-broad strategy focus, rather than concentrating on just a few areas. I suspect that the applications of Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law need to be explicitly considered as part of the analysis that Professor Porter is recommending. A more general weakness in this book is that it assumes that future conditions will be stable enough to draw conclusions about which conditions will be favorable, without giving enough guidance on how to deal with the increasing frequencies and degrees of volatility that we see (in areas like financial markets, commodity prices, the weather, changing customer preferences, and so forth). Although no book that takes such a narrow focus can help but have weaknesses (like having the podiatrist not notice that you have kidney problems), if you want a good start of how to think about competitors, this is the book for you. Just be sure you keep developing yours strategy with additional dimensions after you finish using this analysis. If you have read none of Professor Porter's works, this is the one book you should read.
Rating:
Summary: Clasic for all time
Review: As Adam Smith is to economics and capitalism, Porter is to business strategy within this market system. This is THE seminal book for defining how businesses compete. As technology fads and internet business models ("New economy") come and go, every company must still address the basics of competition as outlined within this book. The frameworks within the book outline:
-How to assess the competitive structure of your industry,
-Generic competitive strategies
-Competitor Analysis -Effects of market signals on competitive behavior
-Competitive moves in response to your strategy
-Competitve strategy in a number of different market environments
-Impact of strategies such as Vertical integration, growth through new products, scale, and M&A
-... much more You will use this book as a reference, and find it is timeless. It is no wonder the Mr. Porter is widely regarded as the preeminent strategist. To put this in practice I recommend books on gaming theory.
Rating:
Summary: general analytical techniques
Review: competitive strateg
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent reference for strategic analysis.
Review: Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter is an excellent source for providing critical analysis for strategic planning. This book outlines Porter's Five Forces Model in a fabulous, easy to comprehend writing style. However, the one flaw to this book is that it is a little weak in the area of emerging technology. It tended to be a little more vague with its detail then the rest of the book. Overall, it is still an excellent book and I would recommend it to everyone in the business community. (Especially MBA students)
Rating:
Summary: A must read
Review: Even if that book is quite old, it is still a must read for people who want to add value to their organisation. It is also the first book that you have to read if you want to start a business or to redefine your business.
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Summary: From Strategy to Marketing
Review: Even though Porter is supposed to be a strategy intellectual, I truly believe that he is truly a marvelous marketing guru. If not, how to explain that we buy several of his books with the same collection of lousy, repeated, common sense ideas?
Rating:
Summary: Amazing framework and techniques for analyzing competitors
Review: I have only read a couple of different chapters of this book, but have also read the book competitive advantage by the same author, and recently took a seminar with the author at Harvard. Porter has developed an excellent set of tools for analyzing a competitor in detail. Chapter 3 in particular presents a systematic way companies over the long term can look at and analyze their competitors. He also presents strategic ways for approaching markets when you are for instance attacking a leader or trying to maintain leadership and fend off challengers, and explains it in a lucid, systematic way. The author is one of the seminal people in the 2nd half of the 20th century associated with business strategy
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Summary: Michael E. Porter : The Master of Positioning School
Review: I met Mr. Porter when I began to study strategic planning because each time I read a book I saw the label of Porter. Mr. Porter is a strong apostle of Positioning school, namely he believes that a firm must position itself in an industry by analyzing the structure of it. Today, Mr. Porter and his school is under fire and an intensive attack (You can look at books of Mintzberg and Stacey ! ). But I strongly beleive that Mr. Porter is a "Logic Man", not an "idealist". He loves material realities. Although today very popular strategic management perspectives are in fashion, the perspective of the Positioning School are here to stay. Please do not think one-sidedly about Competitive Strategy by only reading the opposites of it, instead read the original source. This book is still a very strong classic. Highly reccommended.
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