Death by Success
Being too successful leads to failure unless you are aware of the problem and carefully monitor and protect against it. Every large company faces this problem - in I.T. for example, Google and Microsoft. The rule applies at all levels - individuals, projects/teams, companies and countries. Even potentially our species and the whole living planet. I was reminded again of this yesterday by Victor Cook in "The New Battle for Your Desktop" where he analyses the financials of Google and Microsoft (GOOG & MSFT). He describes a problem with Microsoft: The company actually captured 77.5% of combined revenues in the quarter ended June 30, 2007. Sometimes it's great to be the market leader. But in this case it's not. Microsoft shelled out $539 million for that 77th share point. And it was worth only $172 million after total costs. Not a good thing. To maximize earnings (by optimizing total costs) the company should have captured only 60.3% of the market. That's the ...