And you don’t have to go waiving NDAs around either. You can stop pretending that you’re still innovating when we all know discovery ended long ago. Thanks to the breadth of today’s marketplace, you have options beyond selling out to a bottom feeder who’ll amalgamate your technology with five other dying products, cross-sell existing product lines, and then milk the maintenance dry.
You can instead choose a strategic bold retreat. So if you lack the finances, necessary capabilities, or simply the drive to transition to new technologies and invent new solutions, you can choose to retreat to a defensible niche where your old technology conveys a decisive advantage. Just like Linjett continues to succeed in the leisure sailboat market by focussing on the enthusiast, like Continental continues to succeed with piston engines by focussing on small private aircraft, and like StorageTek continues to sell magnetic tape drives (yes, magnetic tape drives) by focussing on large scale data archives, you can succeed too!
Haven’t upgraded your e-Negotiation platform in five years? No problem! Just ditch the Fortune 500 market and focus on the mid-market where most companies still haven’t adopted a solution. It’ll be new to them for five more years!
Haven’t upgraded your BI tool in five years? No problem! Streamline your integration with the big ERP tools that your average Fortune 500 can’t get rid off. Become the BI tool of choice in that market and continue to rake in recurring maintenance fees at 22% year after year.
Haven’t upgraded your catalog-based e-Marketplace in five years? No problem! Follow the crowd and rebrand it as a “supplier network”. Now it’s new for five more years!
In other words, you can fail at modern technology but still win if you’re bold about it! (Of course, whether or not your customers win is a completely different story.)