We live in a “What have you done for me lately?” world. And nowhere is that more apparent than in the brutally competitive high-tech industry, where companies spend years and megabucks developing groundbreaking products and powerful brands, only to see everything they’ve worked so hard to build evaporate in a heartbeat.
This is nothing new. Breakthrough innovations have been killing off market-leading companies even entire industries for as long as I can remember. And it’s been decades since companies learned that, if they didn’t cannibalize their own products with ongoing improvements, their competitors would be happy to do it for them.
The only real surprise is when companies think the rules don’t apply to them. It’s something I’ll never really understand. And believe me, I’ve tried.
I’ll never understand how Sony (SNE) could get into the motion picture business, become a global media giant, completely take its eye off the ball on the consumer electronics industry it once dominated and then try to pull a fast one by promoting synergies between their disparate businesses.