Eating your young

I came across this bit:

"Are we going to be a player in VoIP? Absolutely. Are we going to be prepared to disrupt our own business? Absolutely, Why? Because if not, somebody else will." (Techdirt)

It reminds me of stuff I used to say way back when, when I was making the case for building Improv (which was code named "BackBay", and as an R&D project "Modeler".) In those days, of course, Lotus (remember?) was the undisputed PC software leader, with 1-2-3 (remember?) being the wunderkind- unbelievable-cash cow for Lotus. I used to say things like "With Improv we threw out the rule book and went back to basics - what do people really need to build good spreadsheets?" What happened of course was that all that talk was great and even convincing while we were building the product, away from the eyes and ears of our field sales force and sales organization. Once the product was done and needed to be launched and sold, suddenly we weren 't quite as easily prepared to "disrupt our own business." Live and learn! Technorati Tags: improv, strategy