Eric Kidd offers some suggestions for independent software vendors (ISVs):
Focus on non-strategic niche around an existing platform. If you end up threatening the platform vendor, they’ll either buy you or squash you. Be careful about creating your own platforms (like Netscape); this makes you uncomfortably strategic.
Go ahead and out-innovate the big players, and hope that vision and technology will overcome money and marketshare.
Forget technology; focus on user requirements and user relationships.
I think ISVs have to do all of the above to entertain any chances of winning. But I’d say that the most important strategy is to envision the future AND go ahead and create it. That is what we want to do.
