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