alt Hacker NewsAgain, shortsighted. There's no reason a business has to have a single product. If you run out of customers for cars, you make HVAC and front end loaders.
A lot of companies simply have no direction and aren't looking to build new products. They had a success, rotated in some myopic execs, flipped into rent-seeking mode and are trying to wring more cash out of the same progressive enshittified product.
Replies
bluGill • today at 2:23 PM
That dilutes your experience and risks losing focus on the customers you already know how to serve well and in turn can destroy your company.
It works for some it fails for others.
Generally you can only profitably expand into adjacent products. Making and selling cars and HVACs are completely different, meaning that your expansion will be starting from zero knowledge. Furthermore, the sales channel of HVACs, sales strategies, etc. is not likely to have much in common with that for cars, so you are essentially creating a whole new startup company. (In the case of HVACs, it would be a startup in a commodity market, which would make no sense, because commodity markets have no real profits.) Doing one thing well is not just Unix philosophy, it is also a sound business strategy. Of course, usually adjacent things that could be done well suggest themselves, but often there is a limit to these.