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Comment by tempguy9999 | Hacker News Reader

> (read: Intel trying real hard to keep people on 4 cores so they could charge an arm and a leg for more)

There's quote, something along the lines of "You have to cannibalise your own business. If you don't someone else will". A lesson intel chose to forget because it made them more money, right up until it didn't.

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I always felt Apple was good at this, in the Steve Jobs era, anyway. Everyone said the iPhone would kill the iPod, but that didn't matter in reality because the iPhone opportunity was so much larger.

Interesting quote. I shall forward it to my boss (we are a software publisher).

That is basically Clayton Christensen whole shtick (may even be his quote). He published a rather influential book 20 years ago (The Innovator's Dilemma) that popularized that idea. It's an interesting read, even if not everything has aged equally well.

That book is on my shelf to be read. In what way did age poorly ?

The book as a whole has aged pretty well (with the caveat that I haven't read it in over a decade). My recollection of the book is that it tended to treat disrupting an entrenched player as a panacea and being disrupted as a death knell. It was somewhat un-nuanced in its disruptor/disrutptee split, and doesn't really look much at why some of the disrupted companies remained perfectly fine and why some of disruptors floundered.

Still a great book and it was highly influential on how I think about business. He's also written a bunch of books after that book that may or may not cover some of those points.

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