Product Strategy for High Technology Companies

“If only…” is a tough pill for many Digital alumni to swallow. Here is what a winning vision might have looked like in the early 1990s with the benefit of hindsight: Digital recognizes the profound changes in its industry and the need to change strategic direction. Accordingly, we will migrate all our computer systems, microprocessor technology, an

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IBM’s Bill Lowe also suffered from tunnel vision when he maintained an IBM-centric view of the future. In 1985, he gave Microsoft the rights to sell the jointly developed DOS operating system to other manufacturers in return for IBM’s free use of it on IBM PCs. IBM, after all, had 80 percent of the DOS market. Microsoft’s Bill Gates saw that this w

Robert Sterns, who was chief strategist at Compaq until he left in 1998, saw the Digital acquisition as a mistake. “In his [Pfeiffer’s] quest for bigness, he lost an understanding of the customer, and built what I call empty market share—large but not profitable.”

Hallucination Sometimes a company looks into the future and sees an exciting opportunity that turns out to be as illusory as a mirage.

Strategic hallucination is a particular problem for new ventures that are trying to establish an entirely new market. They have a vision of the future, but sometimes it never really materializes.

Feasibility It’s all too easy for a company to get carried away and define a core strategic vision that is impossible. It looks good on paper, and company executives are hopeful that they will be able to “carry it off.” But, in fact, a CSV is only as good as its ability to be implemented. Creating an effective core strategic vision is not the end p

Developing a core strategic vision is not a static process.

Kodak, for example, was not interested in Edwin Land’s instant-camera invention in 1947, so Land founded Polaroid Corporation.

In the late 1970s, Adam Osborne was considered by many to be a visionary of the fledgling microcomputer industry. He published his views on its technology and markets in books and magazine articles. In 1981, he introduced the Osborne 1, a portable computer with bundled software that sold for $1,795. His vision was a computer for the masses—not the