Publications
Publications
- Harvard Business Review Digital Articles
How Long Can a Company Thrive Doing Just One Thing?
By: Andy Wu and Scott Duke Kominers
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
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).
About The Authors
