Thriving With Change

Since I was carded at bars well into my ‘30s, I sometimes think people react to my tales of being at the birth of the PC with as much skepticism as those burly bouncers I faced in long ago discos.

But in the 37 years since I left Columbia University to work at Control Data with my freshly printed masters degree, I’ve seen many winners and losers emerge from technology shifts.  What seems common is that the winners focused on their existing strengths and leveraged them in new ways.  Those that didn’t win too often rooted themselves firmly to the ideas that gave them birth, even as the tides of change were eating away that base.

Control Data was an exciting place in the ‘70s, a major part of the mainframe business often called IBM and the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell).  But that world is largely gone.  Some of the old firms continued to thrive as they leveraged strengths to reinvent a new business model, as IBM did with services.  The others disappeared through a series of mergers or complete abandonment of the mainframe space.

In the ‘80s, I joined Xerox and worked closely with the famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where innovation after innovation sparked much of the modern computing world of personal computing and client-server architecture. Along the way, I had a front row seat to the creation and destruction of whole segments of technology:  the minicomputer companies (like DEC and Data General), the word processors (like Wang and Lanier), and the first round of personal computers.   

The graveyard of brands is large.  One firm, Apple, ultimately thrived—not by becoming a better PC manufacturer, but rather by relying on its true core value, humanizing technology.  It delivered that core value in multiple areas with smart products using great design.  Like IBM, it succeeded not by trying to do better what it had already been doing, but by focusing relentlessly on how to build on what it could uniquely offer its customers.

I worked  at Xerox until 2003.  It has survived its own technology shifts, not by building better, cheaper copiers, but by tapping its knowledge of how people use documents to drive high-speed digital printing, on-demand publishing, and services –all creating meaningful marketplaces relevant to its traditional customer base.

Recently, I talked to a long-time mentor at Xerox, now retired.  His career had started out at a timesharing company that offered accounting services to small and mid-sized businesses.  That company went out of business when it failed to react to how so many of its customers were moving accounting solutions to their own PCs.  The firm’s old world disappeared beneath it.

In many ways, echoes of that old timeshare world are returning, as subscription pricing, cloud services and mobility reverberate.  I don’t pretend to have a crystal ball.  But I do believe that each of us in the SMB software world must think about where the market is going, identify what strengths we offer in a changing world, and prepare  for change:  to move quickly, to test ideas, and to identify those core strengths that we believe will sustain us into yet another new world. 

We can’t look backward.  We must look forward, with a keen knowledge of the strengths we bring to the journey.