Ground is slipping below your feet....Planning the obsolescence

As they say success is a path not a destination, this is the reality that all firms are facing today. Take any market technology, oil, publishing, or automobile every sector is facing one breakthrough (read discovery) after another. Most of the time it is enabled by technology behind it. Take example of oil exploration in Canada, technology made it feasible and cost effective to extract oil in Canada and today it is poised to be the biggest oil reserve in world. So let alone Nokia's dominance in mobile phone market, even the dominance of Middle East as top oil supplier of world is not safe. But the biggest turmoil today is in the field of technology, which is not only shaking the biggest players in market but the fate of small failed players go unnoticed. Technology has stopped improving gradually; it is going ahead in leaps and bounds. It’s moving by making real dreams of innovators or evangelists. Not so long ago Nokia and Microsoft were dominant players in mobile and computing domain, with Apple being at best a niche player that was selling insanely successful music players (that too without speakers). But suddenly Nokia that was trying to take control of its ecosystem with acquisition of Symbian, found a rival from a different world different from its own. And today we can see how many players have taken lead and leap ahead of Nokia. But can a company avoid such a fate in first place. What went wrong?

Obsolescence Benefit Matrix

http://ericvansingel.com/evsprologue/
2011-03-12-damn-you-planned-obsolescence-ipad-2-drops/

I think the place it all went wrong was not planning obsolescence effectively. Every product has its life span or period of differentiation, and after that no matter how good the product is either someone will copy it or some better product will come in market to usurp it. Planning product obsolescence is not a new thought, it dates its roots back to 1950s when manufacturers would design products such that their life span is limited or product is made obsolete by a new design after a time period. Those were the days of depletion obsolescence where manufacturer will design a product to deplete after a time period and user is expected to replace the depleted product with a same new product. But today what we are facing is technology or systemic obsolescence where one product is made obsolete not by its depletion but by a newer product with new features, or new technology. Where obsolescence by depletion was in favor of manufacturer, obsolescence by technology requires manufacturer to be at forefront of new technology.

For a company to maintain its relevance in today’s' time it is important to plan obsolescence of its technology, or someone else will plan it. In this war no one is protagonist and no one is antagonist. It’s just a journey to come up with new technology, it’s just a journey to plan obsolescence, because if you wont someone else will.