Skip to Main Content
HBS Home
  • About
  • Academic Programs
  • Alumni
  • Faculty & Research
  • Baker Library
  • Giving
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Initiatives
  • News
  • Recruit
  • Map / Directions
Faculty & Research
  • Faculty
  • Research
  • Featured Topics
  • Academic Units
  • …→
  • Harvard Business School→
  • Faculty & Research→
Publications
Publications
  • Article
  • Harvard Business Review Digital Articles

How Long Can a Company Thrive Doing Just One Thing?

By: Andy Wu and Scott Duke Kominers
  • Format:Electronic
ShareBar

Abstract

The news that the chat app Slack was being sold to veteran customer relationship management company Salesforce for $27.7 billion raised a lot of eyebrows. Why sell after a year of explosive growth? The deal, however, epitomizes a question facing so-called best-of-breed companies such as Slack, Zoom, and Dropbox: how secure is their edge over companies such as Microsoft, which offer integrated software bundles that directly compete. Best-of-breed companies, which do one thing extremely well, have clear priorities and their incremental edge creates value for customers on mission-critical uses and when customers use them intensely—particularly at large organizations. Bundles, however, drive value through integration and can take advantage of more efficient go-to-market sales, not to mention by offering customers the convenience of one-stop-shopping for both sales and support. To maintain their edge against bundles, best-of-breed companies need to be able to keep innovating, lock customers in, and integrate well with other best-of-breed applications.

Keywords

Best-of-breed Companies; Competitive Advantage; Competitive Strategy

Citation

Wu, Andy, and Scott Duke Kominers. "How Long Can a Company Thrive Doing Just One Thing?" Harvard Business Review Digital Articles (December 10, 2020).
  • Find it at Harvard
  • Read Now

About The Authors

Andy Wu

Strategy
→More Publications

Scott Duke Kominers

Entrepreneurial Management
→More Publications

More from the Authors

    • January 2021
    • Faculty Research

    A Three-Part Framework for Entrepreneurial Marketplace Design

    By: Scott Kominers
    • Bloomberg Opinion

    Airbnb Slips a Grand Experiment Into Its IPO

    By: Scott Duke Kominers
    • December 2020
    • Journal of Economic Literature

    The Parable of the Auctioneer: Complexity in Paul R. Milgrom's <i>Discovering Prices</i>

    By: Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym
More from the Authors
  • A Three-Part Framework for Entrepreneurial Marketplace Design By: Scott Kominers
  • Airbnb Slips a Grand Experiment Into Its IPO By: Scott Duke Kominers
  • The Parable of the Auctioneer: Complexity in Paul R. Milgrom's <i>Discovering Prices</i> By: Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym
ǁ
Campus Map
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
→Map & Directions
→More Contact Information
  • Make a Gift
  • Site Map
  • Jobs
  • Harvard University
  • Trademarks
  • Policies
  • Digital Accessibility
Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College