All market share wars are, to one degree or another, fought on multiple fronts. While companies pursue aggressively a forward strike to convince customers to buy more products, they also, when appropriate, engage in a rear-guard action to keep other competitors from entering the market. Nowhere is this truer than in markets like interventional cardiology, where even small differences in design features can have a huge impact on product performance and thus are often crucial to customer adoption. The latest such rear-guard action: the lawsuit filed this past February in The Netherlands by Boston Scientific Corp. to keep Conor Medsystems Inc. from selling its paclitaxel-coated stent in Europe.
The suit itself was hardly a surprise. Boston Scientific officials had been saying publicly for several months that they felt...
