Field of play

I appreciated this thought from Ben Evan's newsletter. A challenge, though, is foreseeing that field of play will change (or is presently changing!) and doing something about it.

"The big shifts in dominance in tech in the last few decades have not generally come from a new product that does the same thing as the old one, but from a company doing something that changes the field of play. Microsoft didn’t overturn IBM’s dominance of mainframes - instead, PCs made mainframes irrelevant. Google didn’t make a new Windows, and Facebook didn’t take on Google at web search - instead, they carved out something new." 

Evans is right, but I don't think it's fair to diminish the uncertainty of the present day. I'm sure IBM didn't believe in the '80s that the mainframe model itself was vulnerable. A lot had to go right to make that happen, including incredible execution by both Microsoft and Intel. At the time, it wasn't a forgone conclusion that Moore's Law would keep kicking, and today's reality would likely be different had it not (and IBM had more time to react).

And even when you see the paradigm shifting, there's plenty of stories of 'old guard' companies trying to acquire the future unsuccessfully or executing poorly in that direction. Or in the case of HP, both. In retrospect, it was clear HP misunderstood and underinvested in smart phones, but it did make moves in the moment. HP hired on Palm's CEO in 2005 and later acquired the (then-anemic) company in 2010. By 2012, with PalmOS and webOS effectively dead, HP let seven very critical years go by. These stories repeat themselves - Facebook acquired Instagram in April 2012 for about $1 billion; Yahoo acquired Tumblr about one year later for about the same price.

Even when you see the field of play changing, management has to be willing to embrace that change. Certainly harder in practice than it was to write that sentence.