You jumped from a story about one emerging business line concept to "all of your products", which is a pretty big leap. It is actually very common for new busi

You jumped from a story about one emerging business line concept to "all of your products", which is a pretty big leap. It is actually very common for new business ideas to live or die based on the support from one senior executive - I saw this from the inside at Fujitsu, Oracle, Sun and Google, and at many partner companies from the outside. In a new business line at an established large company, there is almost always another business line executive's toes you are going to step on. For example, making computer hardware at Oracle steps on the toes of Oracle people selling to computer hardware makers. Shifting to open source steps on toes of internal developers and existing suppliers. It takes a executive support to maintain these kinds of programs until the expected gain can be evaluated fairly against than the risks. If a key executive leaves there is quite often blow back on their pet projects. From the perspective "outside the room" it is frequently unclear whether the exec was just moving on, fighting to the end, or saw the writing on the wall and left while the leaving was good.