Today's Wall Street Journal has a special section on technology. I thought today's (Monday 5-23) was particularly good, and recommend the article on page four by Robert Guth (New Media, Beware).
Point 1: Don't stop thinking about tomorrow. This point is about Tivo, and the question is why didn't they keep innovating, so that they could avoid seeing their lead collapse into products from cable and satellite operators. I must confess that I did a bit of Tivo upgrading myself - and I was amazed how much info there was at the time if you searched for it. What if Tivo had really jumped on the open source idea? I bet there are a lot of people who would have gladly contributed back some of their ideas and code. Just think of what could have happened if they put wireless ethernet in two years ago and developed an open source community...
Point 2: The Netscape Mistake. This point is that while Netscape was under siege on the browser front, they had the start of other businesses like portals, business applications etc. I was working closely with the Netscape team about that time, when they were acquired by AOL and did the iPlanet deal with Sun. The point is true. Netscape was ahead on several fronts - identity management (LDAP), portal software, app servers, and even ecommerce applications. Any of these could have become a major business, but they didn't. Unlike Tivo, Netscape had their future business in sight...they just couldn't get there fast enough.
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