[turnsout]

That's fascinating. It really seems that a lot of businesses end up hyper-optimized to deliver what they already offer, up until the point where anything that isn't a current offer is attacked by corporate antibodies. And that's when the growth they've optimized for suddenly stops.

[bombcar]

There's way too much worship of Steve Jobs, but one thing he had right - either you develop the product that eats your cash cow, or someone else is going to do it.

[mikepurvis]

I’ll never not talk about how he killed their most successful product ever at the time, in 2005— the iPod mini.

In one fell swoop, the small form factor iPod switched from a tiny hard disk to flash memory and the former model was discontinued, before competitors had even really come close to catching up.

[turnsout]

Not to mention the iPhone, which erased the iPod. He also seemed to make that move with zero regret.

[mikepurvis]

They did continue to sell iPod Classic in parallel to iPod touch for a while afterward, and even revamped the UI on the nano to look and feel more like iOS. But yeah, there was obvious cannibalism there, no question about it.