Is a quote from Jeff Jarvis' book: "What Would Google Do". If you suddenly find yourself out of business because your competitors has changed the game, and are light-years ahead of you, it might be because you were too busy milking the cash cow in the gold mine.

Many Companies, IT and software companies included, was in the last happy pre-crisis decade  of crazy growth, very busy milking the Cash Cow in the Gold Mine. The poor beast is not giving so much milk now. And if one is looking up it is clear the world does not look the same as it did before.

many software companies find out, that they completely missed being aware of the costs of running a software business. When the order-book was full,  the dedicated work of doing things better, lowering cost and improving quality was not on the agenda. Hire more staff (if you can them) and cut corners whereever possible,  was the practice of the day.

In the software industry as well as construction industry, the number of poor-quality, too late and too expensive projects grew rapidly. The only difference between construction and Software is, that in construction you always end up using what has been built, and thus getting some value out of the investment. Sadly that is not true for all software projects.

In the meantime a cost effective outsourcing industry has grown up, to do much of the work domestic companies used to do. A even larget threat to the worn out Cash Cows is that lots of, what used to be, expensive software solutions are available for free or very cheap on the internet. Google (here they are again) has created a strong competitor to Microsoft's Cash Cow: Microsoft Office Soute. While Microsoft was busy milking it, Google solved the real problem about real-time collaboration, sharing and version control. This will forever change the landscape of office applications, and Microsoft is way behind (as is Open Office and all the others still on the old paradigm).

I  was recently looking for software for doing on-line surveys. My search led me, among others, to these two companies: 2ask and Survey Monkey. My theory is that 2ask has been busy milking their cash cow (hopefully so), while Survey Monkey changed the business. For a tenth of the price Survey Monkey offers a fancy, slick application that allows you to build your own surveys very easily. Take a look for yourself, who do you want to buy from?

So what are you doing? Spending the time trying to get the old cow to give more milk, doing more of the same, of are you taking the opportunity to discover what business you really are in (another quote from WWGD), and finding ways to do that in a low-cost way?

And in our own kind business there has also been cash cows: Scrum certification classes (we do not do those) with long waiting lists and customers being willing to believe that standing up i a  circle 10 minutes every day would solve all problems. Maybe it is time to rethink that business too?

By Bent Jensen