It's kind of a fractalized representation of a dynamic that happens to businesses at every scale: they get good at one thing, so now the organization pushes bac

It's kind of a fractalized representation of a dynamic that happens to businesses at every scale: they get good at one thing, so now the organization pushes back against changing that thing when conditions change. The business coasts along for some indefinite period, still profitable because of momentum, and then collapses when its market advantage has sufficiently eroded. The success stories generally come with a combination of top-down strong leadership and bottom-up skunkworks teams and units that are given the leniency to take a chance on something new. Sometimes acquisitions take on this role(e.g. Instagram as Facebook's replacement product). If we take the old Microsoftism of "It only gets good at version 3" and extend it with, say, "it starts getting worse after version 7", then every software product should have its prospective replacement start shipping alongside version 4. Actually doing this takes attention to detail and finding an unaddressed niche that would support a different product, though. Compromising and letting too much be reused or too many old requirements pour into the new thing usually causes the effort to fail. It has to be really different, like the IBM team in Boca Raton that came up with the PC design by dispensing with the normal IBM checklist of the time and cludging together some commodity parts and third-party software instead. Most such ideas get squashed by political machinery when put into the context of existing products and teams, which is why the skunkworks approach has to be fastidious.