The best way to leave the market is not to try to enter other markets.


    Tempora mutantur et nos mutantur in illis
    Times are changing and we are changing with them (Ovid)

    Once upon a time ...

    • Micro-Soft (yes, with a dash) released Basic programs.
    • 1C started as a manufacturer of simple accounting systems.
    • Megaplan made products for online planning.

    Years passed ...

    MicroSoft became (I will once again be Captain Evidence) one of the largest companies in the software market, offering almost everything - from games to databases, from business systems to portals. But it all started with the fact that MS took a step away from its main business and released an operating system. Has anyone heard of the fate of Basic program makers?

    1C is often called "Russian MicroSoft" because it also produces (and publishes) completely different software. And besides, there is a huge range of consulting services on the basis of 1C: Production Enterprise Management powerful ERPs are being built that are not inferior to competitors from SAP and Oracle, but cost less than an example. Dozens of other manufacturers of accounting software disappeared without a trace.

    Megaplan in monsters has not yet been knocked out. But he wasn’t on the list for that. When only the lazy one did not start task trackers, and most systems became free, the company realized that most often tasks were set during the sales process. And slowly migrated to the producer of CRM. AmoCRM and SalesForce have not yet been eclipsed, but they have not disappeared from the market either.

    Having achieved success, any company can consider that now the sun is shining only for her. She is big, strong and toothy. Let others swarm somewhere in the distance. And then a giant meteorite arrives, huge dinosaurs die out, and tiny mammals begin their journey to the heights of evolution ...

    Of course, in our time, a meteorite is unlikely to hit your office exactly, but other unpleasant things can happen. For example ...

    1. You will run out of customers.



    Where did all the quests go? Why is the genre so popular for 20 years (from the mid-80s to the mid-2000s) almost ended? Where is Larry and Petka with Vasil Ivanovich? And the audience just changed. The generation that played before took up more serious things and he just had no time to click on the screen. For the new generation, quite different genres are interesting.

    2. Your product / technology will learn to copy.



    Life at Xerox was easy and beautiful. Only she produced cars that could make copies of documents. Customers themselves lined up. And then the court forced to sell a license to use Sharp technology, there other competitors pulled themselves up. As a result, Xerox has become what it has become ... A miserable sight. The iPhone was once the only convenient smartphone on the background of a terrible eerie on Windows Mobile and Symbian. But then, cheap Chinese devices on Android pulled up from below, I stood next to Samsung flagships, not inferior to luxury.

    3. Your product / technology will no longer be relevant.



    Which older generation doesn't remember the Polaroid camera? The optics are terrible, the pictures are tiny and quickly fade, cassettes are expensive. But everything was forgotten when the image appeared on white photo paper by itself. There was no need for film development or a magnifier in a dark closet. Ah, this is a forgotten feeling of happiness when you immediately see what you were shooting (and not after a couple of weeks). Polaroid was killed, of course, by digital photography. Why consider the pale colors of a tiny polaroid card if the camera instantly transfers the photo to the computer. And there, at least watch it, at least print it. Well, smartphones with high-quality cameras and screens finished off the unfortunate Polaroid.

    That is, occupying a “stable position” in our market in our time means only one thing - sitting on a barrel of gunpowder in the middle of a burning steppe and believing that the fire will not reach you.

    Only one way out - without waiting for hour X to develop other markets.

    I often hear from managers that it is necessary to improve quality and expand functionality within the framework of the current product concept. And then the buyer will come. Well, manufacturers of gramophone needles could make them arbitrarily high quality, only gramophone remained only in museums and dusty attics.

    The development of other markets does not mean that paper manufacturers need to run to produce electronics (Nokia certainly did, but it is unlikely to be able to repeat it). It is worth taking a look at neighboring markets and understand what functionality can be transferred from there to your product.

    Remember the Megaplan example at the beginning of the article. Contacts were added to the task setting service - it turned out CRM.

    Telerik, a manufacturer of visual interface libraries for .Net, felt a decrease in interest in this platform and developed the KendoUI library in JavaScript + a set of wrappers for various language environments (PHP, JSP ...). The web application market is on the rise, so Telerik has strengthened its position in the market of component suppliers.

    In the market for time tracking systems , most companies continue to polish the interface or compete in the amount of data collected. Then these data fall out into reports and managers scratch their heads, trying to figure out what to do about it. And only a few take steps towards related markets.

    • They add functionality for issuing and verifying tasks, that is, they invade the territory left by the same Megaplan. The downside is that the market is already highly competitive.
    • Trying to figure out how to predict the effectiveness of employees in the future. The downside is that classical extrapolation methods are used, but the methods cannot be verified. They must be believed or not believed.
    • Implement the ability to view online and record employee screens (this is our Kickidler, and it works like this ).

    In general, as Alice said in the Looking Glass, “in order to stay in place, you need to run forward; and to move forward you have to run very fast. ”

    Did you run?

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