guerilla disruption

Steven O’Grady is, as usual, right on in his discussion of disruptive software development strategy. Money quote:

As Sun Tzu says, “You can be sure of succeeding in your attacks if you only attack places which are undefended,” and yet we see on a regular basis firms committing the technology equivalent of Pickett’s Charge. Examples? How about most every competitor to Microsoft Office, with the notable exception of solutions like SubEthaEdit or Writely. Just about every package that comes along to unseat Microsoft Office over the years has been just as complicated and feature overridden as the real thing, so why switch? Price? That’s usually not enough.

OOo and GNOME Office (or anyone else in our space trying to think about how to get ahead) would do well to read this, print it, and put it on the wall.