[brutus1213]

I understand the top-line bottom-line divide, but I am not fully convinced if the top-line projects are any safer. Wouldn't another reasonable business strategy be to get rid of all new projects, and only focus on operations-as-is during times of economic uncertainty?

[angry_octet]

That's exactly what weak management does. Family management is especially prone to this IME. Cut new investment, cut cost of inputs, labour, quality control.

That works as long as you have weak competitors (or a moat) and nothing terrible happens, like high defects. Essentially you're coasting on prior investment. But as soon as something changes in the market you're falling behind.

What I've often observed is that new low cost competitors introduce features which are often reserved for high end devices/products due to market segmentation. The dominant player refuses to adapt and hence they lose all their low end market share, the volume of which is necessary to make the whole thing work. Meanwhile new customers start with the lost cost ecosystem.

I've seen this happen with e.g. Agilent, or SaaS companies, who charge 10x for something that costs little, like SaML/AD auth.

Imagine if NVIDIA had charged for CUDA or considered it a distraction from selling graphics cards. They wouldn't own the HPC/ML space if they had done that.

[pixl97]

That depends if you're about to get ate by your competitions new product

[nemo44x]

That would be an extreme action. You do still need to be working with the future in mind. Anything that looks promising to revenue growth in the nearish future should probably continue to be invested in. You may ask those teams to become more scrappy and figure out how to achieve their goals with minimal new investment, especially if the new revenue streams are still a few quarters from coming online.

[jldugger]

> Wouldn't another reasonable business strategy be to get rid of all new projects

Only if you want to close the company in ten years