> When I see a highly successful 40+ year old piece of software, my first instinct isn’t to ask what the people behind it can learn from me but what I can learn

> When I see a highly successful 40+ year old piece of software, my first instinct isn’t to ask what the people behind it can learn from me but what I can learn from them. This is how incumbents die: when the fact that something has existed for a long time is taken as proof of it being at no risk of disappearing. I used to work for a company that has been around for roughly 150 years. And it is precisely the attitude that "we've been around for 150 years" that made it blind to the fact that in the last 15 years, it has become a little bit less relevant every year because disruptors slowly eats away its market. In one sector the company would boast 3% growth year over year - while glossing over the fact that the sector had a growth of several hundred percent per year. You can have growth and at the same time lose market share at an astonishing rate. This is kind of what happened to Emacs. There has been an astonishing growth in the number of developers over the past decades. Which means the "market" for editors and IDEs has exploded. And while more people may be using Emacs today than ever before, I would hazard a guess that the market share has gone down.