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Apple is really good at this. They are always willing to obsolete their products if there is something else better. A great example is the iPhone. They didn't c
by mronge 18y ago
Apple is really good at this. They are always willing to obsolete their products if there is something else better. A great example is the iPhone. They didn't care that it would cannibalize iPod sales, because they knew the iPhone was the next move. If they didn't do it, someone eventually would shrewdly combine music + phone and beat them to the punch. By trying to constantly out do themselves, and make a better "iPod", they stay ahead of the curve, and make sure the sales always come back to Apple.
Steve Jobs is a big advocate of this. In hindsight it seems so obvious, but most companies just don't get it.
- endtime 18y agoMy dad once told me (in a business context; otherwise this would sound kind of weird): "If you're going to get destroyed, you want to own the means of your own destruction." It makes sense to me, but maybe that's easy to say as a student and hard to say as an executive with shareholders.
- kragen 18y agoI suspect that the shareholders, by and large, are pretty happy with the "owning" part; I am guessing that it's your Senior Vice President of Polaroid for Organic Chemistry Research you have to worry about.
- lacker 18y agoIt's easy to say as an executive too. Just hard to do. Any music exec will tell you "We need to own music distribution on the internet." But it's hard for an organization to actually work on two goals at once when those goals are 1. Crush the new business model 2. Make the new business model your own You have different parts of the same company working against each other, and that either poisons the environment or everyone ends up favoring one side over the other.