I had an interesting conversation the other day with Mouli, who is a veteran in IT Services.
We were talking about Xerox, how they were so successful in their business and how they pioneered several concepts in Services and products side.
It is ironical it was to see how the global success of Xerox in its monopoly business of copiers blinded them to understand the power of the technologies which they had themselves invented.
Product technologies like GUI, Mouse, PC, Ethernet were first created in Xerox research labs but Xerox failed to monetize these ideas and see the true potential of those ideas because they were so focused on the “successful “ business model of selling and maintaining photocopiers.
So a company which could have been pioneer in desktop computing and networking eventually is slotted as a document management and services company only.
The example of how IBM underestimated the power of DOS and allowed MS to create their monopoly on desktop OS is too famous to bear repetition.
Is there a lesson to be learnt here?
What is the new opportunity we are missing out by being too successful in the traditional business model of IT services?
