Eventually your products, your development capacity and feel for the customers needs now is so out of touch, you cannot get back.

At that point, it is absolutely the best thing to get rid of everyone and just keep selling the product you have. Too often a company tries to hold on to long, adding new features that don't actually improve anything.

I wish more companies were willing to admit when they reached that point.

It seems few big companies are able to maintain a culture of continuously trying to reinvent themselves and find the next big thing.

In addition to buying the next big thing (effective but requires $$$) I think intentionally trying to disrupt/reinvent your own products before your competition does is a great way to not miss the next big thing.

> Maybe you just want to run a laundromat? Is that not enough these days?

It's enough, until someone comes up with something that disrupts the industry. In a fast-evolving world, standing still is a doomed strategy. Do you really want to be the bookseller when Amazon comes along? Or the taxi driver competing with Uber? or on the board of RIM watching the Apple keynote in 2007?

Edit: Come to think of it, this rather parallels the natural world. Very few creatures have been able to stay relatively unchanged for tens of millions of years. They have been able to do so because the niche the evolved to optimally fill has remained unchanged and undisrupted. The rest of the natural world undergoes constant churn as new species emerge and others go extinct. It's the same in business. The less likely your niche is to be disrupted the more insulated you'll be from the necessity to change (assuming you've optimally adapted). Prime examples are best-in-class restaurants, whose proprietors often do just about the same thing their entire lives very successfully.

When it comes to new tech and frameworks, those who pay don't care if use React, Angular or Svelte. They only want a working product that provides value for money.

Losing business has little to do with the technology that's being used or sold, it has everything to do with the problem that the business intends to solve or the need it intends to cater. And how well it succeeds in doing that.

You don't become an outdated dinosaur overnight because someone comes up with technology that brings marginal improvements to the customer. You become an outdated dinosaur if your competition figures out a radical new way of doing things.

IKEA didn't roll-up the furniture business because it re-invented chairs, tables, beds or cupboards. It succeeded in doing that because it successfully marketed self-assembly as a convenience to it's customers, eliminating a big part of the production chain. Moreover, that - in turn - opened up the door to disposable furniture by introducing low-cost materials, and a faster design cycle that has come to a point that it defines furnishing fashion trends.

My point is that - as an engineering team - you could decide to switch to the newest framework, stay on edge in tech trends, and still miss the boat completely because business still sticks to an outdated model while customer behavior - wants, needs, trends,... - have already shifted a long way ago.

Put differently, it's still possible to build a Facebook/Reddit/Twitter clone based on the latest and greatest technologies and still fail because you expect to push those out of that market. Whereas it's viable to do the same thing, but only if you differentiate by catering to the needs of a specific market segment. Hence why you see platforms like Mastodon thrive without exponential growth, even though Twitter caters to billions.

A successful or stable product is by definition not tied to temporary trends. It caters to a universal need that people will always have. When the market is saturated and sales plateau, the trick then isn't to fundamentally re-invent your product. It's to use what you've learned and tackle an adjacent segment of the market with a new product or service.

In software the vast majority of companies are one-trick ponies that stick to a single product or service that's too specific, and doesn't allow them to expand to other areas. That's what makes them so vulnerable for either a competitor that brings true business innovation, or fundamental shift in what consumers want next.

Put more succinctly: people tend to rail against corporate, boring, byzantine constructions such as SAP. But that's exactly how they operate. They started out doing payroll and accounting, and they expanded from that by incorporating adjacent parts of business processes in their software such as logistics, material management and production planning. A corporation like SAP doesn't go along in the short-run hype cycle unless a significant game-changer comes along such as affordable cloud solutions.

Now, hiring for experience in specific technologies or frameworks only makes sense if you're going to hire someone for the long haul, whereas if the horizon of your business doesn't extend beyond the next 2 or 3 quarters, well, you're shooting yourself in the foot by rejecting good, well-motivated candidates based on them not having 5 years experience with bleeding edge FancyFramework2020.

You continue to innovate. You do a better job at understanding your customer's needs and fulfilling them. You do a better job at marketing, positioning, and advertising. You give better customer service. There's tons of ways to compete, other than raw product uniqueness.

According to your article you sit back and say "oh thats totally ok because thats innovation and I'm happy that everyone has copied me and destroyed my advantage".

Meh. A better product is not a sustainable competitive advantage anyway. Better to have a product "arms race" where everybody is forced to "innovate or die", IMO.

Saying "just build something people want" is reductionist well past the point of being useless, it's almost actively insulting. Customer acquisition is the death of almost every failed company.