What’s hot today is not tomorrow!
Posted by palanis on February 13, 2007
I was reading Gokul’s post on how things that were hot once could get “boring” eventually. This happens very commonly to tech professionals in any industry.
I guess any application, once it hits mainstream market and starts seeing cycles of cost reductions will eventually get commoditized. With so much R&D money invested by big corporations things become standardized and will be perceived as commonplace or perhaps “boring”. This is what happened to PC hardware industryin late 90s, networking gear in 2000s. It happens a lot in semiconductor industry as well. When I entered the semiconductor industry I got the chance to work on High Speed Serial I/O which was considered state of the art during that time. Now Serial I/O IP is available for sale by multiple vendors and it is headed towards the direction of becoming a commodity.
When things get “boring”, I guess you can take two routes: 1. Get into a different field that requires most of your skillset but still is not commoditized and has lot of open challenges; or 2. Move up the value chain in your field/domain so that you are working on where the challenges and fortune lie in your industry. (Examples: Adding more services on the top of your infrastructure, adding more software features to your existing hardware, adding applications to your solution that are complementary so that you provide a broader portfolio of products, or just sheer improve the horsepower/performance of your current app if there is a market need for it)
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Loori said
Commoditization is true for hardware products… like Video codecs for DVD players.. was HOT once… but now dead cheap. I think what is important is if your product inspires other better products and applications or not. It must not be a dead end innovation as you said… It needs to be something people can build over.
But software sadly seems to go the other way… it is not excess utake that kills the majority of products but it is failed promises. Software rarely does anythign of what was promised. Hence there is a lot of room for innovation and ‘killer apps’.