Lexis Nexis is a good example of how far a tech company can fall when it no longer thinks of itself as a tech company. One thing this article doesn't mention is

Lexis Nexis is a good example of how far a tech company can fall when it no longer thinks of itself as a tech company. One thing this article doesn't mention is how utterly Lexis Nexis used to dominate the industry. In the 1980s and 1990s, the entire law profession was entirely dependent on it, and it was massively profitable. And it was independent. Lexis Nexis got started in the 1960s. They came up with their own proprietary format for storing and searching over legal briefs (most of the technology we have now, such as SQL databases, did not exist then). Their format started off as text files over which they could do regex, based on your search parameters, but then they ran into issues of storage and how should they show related items? (Graph databases were a long way in the future.) They came up with a solution that would seem primitive to us now, but which was cutting edge in the 1960s, and so they became very successful. Then they focused on hiring sales people to be sure that every law firm in the country was dependent on them. That was surely the right move in the 1960s, but they stopped developing innovative technology. They made no significant changes to their technology till after 2000, when they were clearly in trouble. Just to repeat that, they went 40 years without making any significant changes to their technology. The lawyers and the salespeople were running the company and their attitude was something like "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." This is a reasonable attitude if you are in a mature, steady, unchanging field, but they weren't. They ignored the rise of SQL databases, but they could not avoid the Internet. Around 2001 they formed a committee to explore a possible switch to an XML storage format, and they explored RDF as a way of representing the poly-hierarchy that is natural in law. RDF tools were emerging that would allow them to do graph searches. I am not sure what technology they eventually decided upon. I know they did eventually modernize their technology, but they were dragged to it by the Internet, they did not do it happily. I have an admiration for the startup advice that Steve Blank gives, but when I think of companies like Lexis Nexis, I find myself doubting the line "A startup is a temporary organization in search of a business model, it must eventually transition to an organization that is focused on executing a proven business model." My problem with that idea is that things change over time, and all business models eventually die, and most businesses die (Lexis Nexis was eventually bought) so all businesses should be thought of as "a temporary organization in search of a business model" -- the moment you stop searching is the moment you start to die.