Mondex, backed by the largest bank HSBC in Hong Kong, is a cash-based smart card which also targeting the small payment market in Hong Kong. Mondex was launched at almost the same time as Octopus, and they are direct competitors with each others. Unlike Octopus, Mondex has a very low penetration rate after its first launch and totally disappeared in 2001 in Hong Kong. (Teams, please verify this data)
             Octopus and Mondex are launched almost at the same time and both are backed by big players in Hong Kong, why Octopus is so success now while Mondex totally failed? This could be explained by the positive feedback of network industries – "strong gets stronger and weak gets weaker; success begets more success, and failure breeds failure".
             Positive feedback provides increasing return to the network industries. The more customers a network gets, the more attractive that network becomes to other customers. That makes it easier for the network to attract another customer. That customer makes it even easier for the network to attract the next customer, and so on. Positive feedback is especially important on the merchant side of this payment card industry. As more consumers have a particular card brand and more merchants take that card brand, it becomes harder and harder for other merchants not to take that card brand. Merchants may risk losing sales if they don't take that card brand.
             Octopus adopted a revolution approach by controlled migration. With the retirement of common stored value ticket (CSVT), customers are forced to change to use Octopus. This helped Octopus to gain millions of card holders in just a few months and get into virtuous cycle easily. As more and more customers own Octopus, more and more other merchants willing to join the Octopus network.
             Unlike Octopus who started from the mass transportation and, Mondex started in other consumer markets with just on
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