The Power of Positive Destruction

Chapter 4 What Do I Do Now?

Sometimes things actually start to seem easy; you feel like you’ve made it. Maybe you even think you can stop to rest or at least take a moment to breathe. What I’ve learned is that you can never get too comfortable. Just when you think you’re at the top of your game, something comes along and challenges your position.

Things were finally going well, and we had seven years of success under our belt in which we identified a need no one else had, established an industry, and enabled the shift from manual to electronic trading, then something happened that changed everything. Microsoft Windows came out, shifting from ASCII codes and green-screen computing to a graphical user interface (GUI), which completely changed how people interacted with the computer. This new generation of software was light years ahead of MS-DOS, the system on which our order management system (OMS) application was built. Before too long, customers wanted a new Windows application. We were not yet offering one and didn’t have a solid plan to do so. We knew it would require a huge investment to completely rebuild our application on this new operating system. Competitors started entering our space—none of whom had any legacy systems to replace. They came out with new Windows-based applications. Their new product made ours look incredibly antiquated.

We hadn’t faced any competition for seven years. Now we were in a fierce war with the shiny new things, and we weren’t at all prepared ...