The earlier article got a bit of interest, a lot more than I expected, but also some discussion of whether it made sense at all. An example oft quoted is of Google. So using recent events I’d like add this post to underline what exactly the Peter Principle of Innovation says.
This week Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, underscoring the fact that it is an advertising company. In the meanwhile Twitter an SMS based webapp exploded and continues to grow. And finally Dodgeball a company in the same space as Twitter was bought by Google and left to languish – clearly it did not fit in with the advertising-uber-alles credo.
The cash-cow – advertising. Other innovative applications don’t make it. A twist of irony is that Evan Williams, left Google and created Twitter underlining the part in the original article that innovators leave to form other companies. Clearly it could not have happened inside Google as it has no immediate relationship to the cash-cow.
‘Nuff said.
Hah! You nailed it Nitin.
Disclaimer: I work at Sun, *but*, I think they’re doing a great job of sacrificing sacred cows. What were once considered crown jewels: Solaris, Java, SPARC, have been open sourced. Software is generally free for production use. We sell Intel and AMD boxes running Linux and Windows.
Why is Sun so willing to do this? Because our “cash cow” was running out of milk. As someone once said when we started giving away software, “well, you weren’t buying our software anyway, so we might as well give it away.”
But we could also have gone the way of DEC and others, hanging on to our old ways as the ship goes down. I value the bravery and downright cockiness of our executive leadership.