Vertical market vs horizontal
Traditionally, a vertical market VAR (Value Added Reseller) would provide a top-to-bottom solution (hardware through applications to support) for a very narrow market, such as shoe stores. His system would have little or no application outside shoe stores but be complete for that niche.
A horizontal VAR would provide a solution, such as document scanning, that was applicable to a wide variety of businesses, but would not be a complete top-to-bottom solution for any of them.
Today, the term "vertical market" has been weakened and is often used to designate just a major specialized software application for a particular narrow business niche, such as shoe stores, because in today's more modular world, every "vertical solution" has to be integrated with, and get along with, a whole lot of horizontal stuff like spreadsheets, word processing, Internet browsers, etc.
I remember the days (late '80s) when vertical VARS were being forced to deal with this horizontal stuff, and they didn't like it one bit. They were accustomed to computer systems they supplied being used to run their software and only their software. The clients were now insisting that computers were general purpose devices and they wanted to run word processing, general printing, spreadsheets, and the like on the same system.
