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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

> No one ever stuck around by saying "everything is good, [...] spend a bit of time in R&D to make sure we have other bait"

That's more or less what FogCreek did with Trello and CoPilot. While FogBugz was "good enough" to more or less run on rails, they made other bets to expand or productize some of their internal toolkit. It worked so well that these side-bets eventually got much bigger than FogBugz.

I wish more people tried that, instead of messing with their cash-cows. Yes, sometimes you have to keep up with competition or "innovate" in your own space, but if you got big already, chances are that you've done your best work already - leave it as it is and move on.

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This has long confused me about energy companies. You're big in coal, or gas, or whatever, and see green energy as a competitive threat. Why not take some of those massive profits and treat it as lengthy and luxurious runway to leapfrog into those new markets instead? There's a defeatism there that I wouldn't have anticipated based on how confident and aggressive those companies have historically been.

It is really a shame that there is not a carbon dioxide tax and have it pay out for sequestering carbon dioxide (negative emissions). Sequestering CO2 in geologic formations would fit right in with oil and gas company's core competencies. Many of those companies supported a carbon dioxide tax and they could have transitioned to companies just sequestering carbon dioxide sometime in the future. This could still be done right now, but current politics is more interested in punishing the other side than finding win/win solutions.

You say 'this could still be done right now', but in many cases it is being done already. For example the company I work for [0] spent many years databasing where oil reservoirs were globally. Now we sell the same information for sequestering CO2 in the empty reservoirs :-)

[0] https://www.cgg.com/industry-applications/energy-transition/...

That's cool. Looks like quite a big international operation. Who are some of your customers and places where they are sequestering CO2? I had not heard it being done at commercial scale yet and don't see any examples on the website.

Some are, but it may not be obvious because instead of doing this directly within their company they are becoming venture capital funds for different energy markets.

For example Shell Ventures [0] funds companies like d.light (solar home energy) and Husk (off grid renewable energy)

[0] https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/new-energies/she...

That's basically Shell's strategy.

So now you're Exxon, and you see that Shell has significant investments into oil AND Green energy (specifically Wind right now for Shell). How do you plan to beat Shell at their dual-strategy game?

Exxon double-down on oil. You can't just do the same strategy as someone else and expect to get ahead. You gotta place your bets on a different strategy.

> You can't just do the same strategy as someone else and expect to get ahead. You gotta place your bets on a different strategy.

No, you don't. Betting all on black is just a different gamble, and in my opinion a more risky one. But investors are ok with it because many prefer pure play gambles.

There's no law of nature saying that you have to zig when others zag. A big opportunity like clean energy has room for many winners.

It's a bit different in that space because the "new markets" are seen as a thread that will cannibalize the core business. It becomes a major political issue within the organization.

Not to mention the reputation of the organization might make it difficult to attract and retain the types of innovators and professionals it needs to succeed.

Whereas with FogBugz, they were investing in complementary products, not destroying their own market.

There's a popular book called The Innovator's Dilemma that assesses the phenomenon of incumbents being out-competed by upstarts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma

Every energy company that I know of makes substantial R&D investments in an effort to patent the most likely technology paths forward. They all hope to develop a portfolio of patents that will allow them to sue any new competitor that becomes a threat.

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