“We can’t do this product. . .it will put us out of business.” –SteveB on the Office.NET plans shortly before presenting those plans to the entire team after a year of planning.
Wow. Talk about lessons learned! Reading about that meeting and how pumped everyone was had me charged up reading it.
I had a bCentral hosting account at one point (and a Windows Live blog account too). Neither lasted as the attention-span to consumer and small-business tended to wander. The effect was a bit like dealing with the M&A of telephony providers (remember VoiceStream?).
For me, I still have broken-links pain from the effort to migrate from Windows Server hosting to Apache *nix hosting (via sequences of hosting-service acquisitions) where case sensitivity required tricking FrontPage/local-IIS/VSS into behaving as if operating in a case-sensitive world.
The lifecycle issues and the way technologies hang on at the delivery end, until they don't is going to be interesting to watch as you account for XML fashion growth and decline. It now reminds me of the flowering of ASN.1, OSI models (and ODA) and (inevitable?) decline in the face of alacrity.
"they were concerned about what might happen if an individual started using this and then it was appealing to enterprises but not sold or supported by our enterprise sales force. It could even undermine Enterprise Agreement growth. It could cause customers to question the role of enterprise servers and cause troubles for the new and fast-growing Windows 2000 business."
I believe that all software companies whose revenue was term license-based had the exact same meetings.
My group owned AutoCAD and all cloud services for Autodesk.
I started to ask why we needed to ship "shiny round things" to distribute our software, and we thought that our move towards subscription-based licensing would be accelerated by offering software and services. We wrote framing memos and vision docs (I forget what we called them), and put together a meeting for the CEO and others that was almost exactly like the one you describe with execs to explain our plan. For that we presented the vision in PPT, and we had a prototype, an integration plan for other features across Autodesk's non-AutoCAD products and services, etc.
The CEO loved it - he was a product guy. The go-to-market execs were just horrified. The idea that we - a company who sold to customers almost exclusively through resellers - would let users subscribe directly from our newly-reconfigured Buzzsaw.com site scared the hell out of our sales leaders.
I wondered 4 years later if tension around this transition was what led to BobMu's leaving STB. I wondered what the board of ADBE made of CEO Bruce Chizen betting on the cloud and services years before they were ready. In a job interview there, a couple of years after Chizen retired (I went to MSFT instead), it was clear that they wanted me to create the operations function you described, years after their cloud intentions were already public and invested in.
Everyone I talked to in the valley discussed how dangerous and yet inevitable this transition was. It's one thing to build your company from scratch around this (SFDC) and another to take a successful enterprise software company towards this. Remember Ray and his "few years of profitability dips" speech?
This ADSK transition was finally finished 10 years later in 2017, with a quadrupling in revenue occurring in just five years as a result. It really works.
I don't have the exact quote that killed (deferred) the project for 4 years (eventually, everyone had to cross this chasm or die), but “We can’t do this product. . .it will put us out of business.” sounds about right. 😊
Wow. Talk about lessons learned! Reading about that meeting and how pumped everyone was had me charged up reading it.
I had a bCentral hosting account at one point (and a Windows Live blog account too). Neither lasted as the attention-span to consumer and small-business tended to wander. The effect was a bit like dealing with the M&A of telephony providers (remember VoiceStream?).
For me, I still have broken-links pain from the effort to migrate from Windows Server hosting to Apache *nix hosting (via sequences of hosting-service acquisitions) where case sensitivity required tricking FrontPage/local-IIS/VSS into behaving as if operating in a case-sensitive world.
The lifecycle issues and the way technologies hang on at the delivery end, until they don't is going to be interesting to watch as you account for XML fashion growth and decline. It now reminds me of the flowering of ASN.1, OSI models (and ODA) and (inevitable?) decline in the face of alacrity.
"they were concerned about what might happen if an individual started using this and then it was appealing to enterprises but not sold or supported by our enterprise sales force. It could even undermine Enterprise Agreement growth. It could cause customers to question the role of enterprise servers and cause troubles for the new and fast-growing Windows 2000 business."
I believe that all software companies whose revenue was term license-based had the exact same meetings.
My group owned AutoCAD and all cloud services for Autodesk.
I started to ask why we needed to ship "shiny round things" to distribute our software, and we thought that our move towards subscription-based licensing would be accelerated by offering software and services. We wrote framing memos and vision docs (I forget what we called them), and put together a meeting for the CEO and others that was almost exactly like the one you describe with execs to explain our plan. For that we presented the vision in PPT, and we had a prototype, an integration plan for other features across Autodesk's non-AutoCAD products and services, etc.
The CEO loved it - he was a product guy. The go-to-market execs were just horrified. The idea that we - a company who sold to customers almost exclusively through resellers - would let users subscribe directly from our newly-reconfigured Buzzsaw.com site scared the hell out of our sales leaders.
I wondered 4 years later if tension around this transition was what led to BobMu's leaving STB. I wondered what the board of ADBE made of CEO Bruce Chizen betting on the cloud and services years before they were ready. In a job interview there, a couple of years after Chizen retired (I went to MSFT instead), it was clear that they wanted me to create the operations function you described, years after their cloud intentions were already public and invested in.
Everyone I talked to in the valley discussed how dangerous and yet inevitable this transition was. It's one thing to build your company from scratch around this (SFDC) and another to take a successful enterprise software company towards this. Remember Ray and his "few years of profitability dips" speech?
This ADSK transition was finally finished 10 years later in 2017, with a quadrupling in revenue occurring in just five years as a result. It really works.
I don't have the exact quote that killed (deferred) the project for 4 years (eventually, everyone had to cross this chasm or die), but “We can’t do this product. . .it will put us out of business.” sounds about right. 😊