What's 'the arc', you ask?
It comes from a discussion I had with Charles Fitzgerald a while back, observing that certain successful tech companies follow an arc. It's a little richer than a timeline of newness & excitement through to jaded boredom. It goes something like this.
- Found company based on a great idea and great execution.
- As important, be lucky enough to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right backing & connections, to take off quickly.
- Exploit an economic trend (some dramatically reducing price curve) and get products to a receptive audience.
- Grow (as a company - # people) rapidly - introducing interesting management expansion problems (how do we scale? who do we hire? how do we retain our 'culture'
- Make a ton of money and become successful
- Keep on doing 'the right thing' for customers.
- Make a few enemies
- Make more money and get a lot of customers.
- Become dominant in a market - expand into other markets, and make more enemies. Still mostly doing the right thing for customers.
- Be threatened by a new trend that may be disruptive
- Re-engineering your entire business to focus on the disruption, and in doing so not recognize that you just screwed your customers.
- Leverage an existing dominant product position to gain traction against the disruption.
- Government involvement and scrutiny
- Competitors cry foul
- Lawyers
In the above scenario you can insert Microsoft (Windows/Office + "Internet Tidal Wave" + Internet Explorer) or Google (Search + "Everything is Social" + SPYW).
Interestingly Google's arc is half the time period of Microsofts. I'm assuming Facebook's will be half the time period of Google's.
Perhaps we should just rename this "Fitzgerald's law" and see if it sticks?
1 comment:
I was reading the list and thinking about the Internet Tidal Wave and there you list it later on.
There's a tractor and a backhoe here needing someone to help pilot them when you want a working break.
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