Focus on selling what, and to whom? Remember, they were selling one-time licenses, not subscriptions, so 95% market share means 95% of users had their product,

Focus on selling what, and to whom? Remember, they were selling one-time licenses, not subscriptions, so 95% market share means 95% of users had their product, not that they sold something to 95% of them that year. One of the biggest challenges about being a dominant player is actually that you mostly compete against the previous version of your products. "Why should I upgrade? This isn't any better than the edition I bought last year." So the business isn't fighting to get that last 5% of the share; that only allows it to grow a measly 5%. Instead, it has to focus very strongly on finding ways to make its existing customer base give it more money. And you do that by improving your products and services so that you can get existing customers to buy more of them. It's the only lever you really have, so doing almost anything else is crazy. And here's a company failing to even address existing concerns with its products, so it's hard to construct a story on how it was acting rationally. It's not even clear how much money it was even making; how well did those new versions sell, given that they didn't seem to improve much? So I submit that even on a short-term basis, they weren't acting rationally at all. Not to mention the long-term basis. You should note that Quark was privately held, so the stuff about the stock market doesn't apply here. One of the big advantages of being private is that you can play the long game. But they weren't! If you're not making your customers happy, someone else will. It's easy to blame the environment, but the environment was actually giving them all kinds of feedback about what they should be doing and it's the environment that allowed a competitor to come in and eat their lunch.