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

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

Once upon a time ...

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

Years have passed ...

MicroSoft has become (I will once again be Captain Obvious) one of the largest companies in the software market, offering almost everything - from games to databases, about business systems to portals. But it all started with the fact that MS made a step away from its core business and released an operating system. Has anyone heard about the fate of the producers of programs on Basic?

1C is often called "Russian MicroSoft" because it also produces (and publishes) completely different software. And besides, it turns out a huge range of consulting services and on the basis of 1C: Manufacturing enterprise management builds powerful ERP, which are not inferior to competitors from SAP and Oracle, and are cheaper than the example. Dozens of other accounting software makers disappeared without a trace.
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Megaplan in monsters has not yet been knocked out. But he was not on the list for that. When task trackers did not start doing just lazy, and most of the systems became free, the company realized that most often tasks are set in the process of selling something. And slowly migrated to the CRM manufacturer. AmoCRM and SalesForce has not yet eclipsed, but it has not disappeared from the market either.

Having achieved success, any company can consider that now the sun shines only for it. She is big, strong and toothy. Let others fumble somewhere far away. And then a giant meteorite flies in, 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 fall exactly into your office, but other unpleasant things can happen. For example…

1. You have run out of customers.



Where are all the quests? Why was the genre so popular for 20 years (from the mid-80s to the mid-2000s) almost over? Where are Larry and Petka with Vasil Ivanych? And just changed the audience. The generation that had played before was taken up with more serious things and he simply had no time to click on the screen. For the new generation, other genres are interesting.

2. Your product / technology will learn to copy.



Easy and beautiful was life in the company Xerox. Only she produced cars that can make copies of documents. Clients themselves lined up. And then the court forced to sell a license to use the technology Sharp, there and other competitors pulled up. As a result, Xerox has become what it has become ... A pitiful sight. The iPhone was once the only convenient smartphone amid a terrible eeriness on Windows Mobile and Symbian. But then cheap Chinese devices on Android came up from below, I got up next to the flagships of Samsung, not inferior in luxury.

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



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

That is, to occupy a "stable position" in its market in our time means only one thing - to sit on the barrel with gunpowder in the middle of the burning steppe and to believe that fire will not get to you.

There is only one way out - without waiting for X hours to explore other markets.

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

Mastering other markets does not mean that papermakers need to run to produce electronics (Nokia has certainly succeeded, but this is unlikely to be repeated). It is worth taking a look at the neighboring markets and understand what functionality can be transferred from there to your product.

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

Telerik, maker of visual interface libraries for .Net, sensed a decline 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 component vendor market.

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 in reports and managers scratch their heads, trying to figure out what to do about it. And only a few take steps towards adjacent markets.

• They add functionality for issuing and checking 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 performance of employees in the future. The downside is that classic extrapolation methods are used, and methods cannot be verified. They must believe or not believe.
• Implement the ability to view online and record screenshots of employees (this is our Kickidler, and it works like this ).

In general, as Alice in Wonderland said, “to stay in place, here you need to run forward; and to move forward you have to run very fast. ”

Ran?