[chrischen]

Treat your business like a consulting service, and treat whatever technology you have not as the end product but as a tool you use to provide whatever service you are providing at higher quality or at lower costs.

Essentially the "do things that don't scale" advice is just this. It puts your technology at the backseat.

[jorgeleo]

I am curious, what is your personal experience with this approach? can you elaborate?

[nickpsecurity]

IBM moved much of their business to that where it's about services + their own tech. Many firms used 4GL's or other productivity boosters to deliver more deliverables to customers for same or reduced price. Sun had a neat language for web apps called DASL that they didn't publish since they used it internally for customers they delivered sites/apps to. Google and Facebook develop a lot of software that could be products in themselves just to improve their real stream of revenue from advertisers. Android is a prominent one where they practically give it away to get the ad money from their built-in apps. I developed a mental list of tools and tactics to knock out a large swath of vulnerability in systems and networks that people would only get consulting with me. And so on and so forth.