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This could very well be a calculated decision. It's well known in financial management how product lines develop in general and how you manage their lifecycle p
by PeterisP 5y ago
This could very well be a calculated decision. It's well known in financial management how product lines develop in general and how you manage their lifecycle profitably; most product lines aren't forever, some of your products will be at a investment stage (expenses with a calculation of future profit extraction), for many there's a growth stage where you reinvest profits to gain revenue, there's a stable running stage where you get some sustainable margins, and there's often an extraction/"milking" stage with intentional unsustainably high margins - one well-known way to shut down a product is to milk it until death while starving it of any resources. In quite a few (though not nearly all) cases that is the most profitable way of closing down a product line for which you don't think a long-term future is profitable; you cut expenses so that you extract at least some profits out of the inertia as opposed to running at near-zero profits until it eventually dies anyway.
It would certainly be incompetent to just keep investing in all declining product lines; it's a valid business strategy to buy (or build) a product with no long-term future and extract as much as you can before it collapses - the point of the business is not to sustain/operate products as long as possible, but to extract as much profit as possible from those products. Extra investment in a declining product might make the product last, say, two years longer - but will those last two years be profitable enough (as opposed to just self-sustaining) to repay that investment? Business always has to take care to not fall for the sunk cost fallacy.
- BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 5y agoXerox has/had a record of walking away from technologies not very many years after bragging about customer adaptations. It has been slowly shrinking over the decades. Customers need a viable migration path forward. The last thing customers want is a product that can do longer be used when it's a long standing part of their business process.