Jamie Zawinski said something similar about Netscape. The classic story is that Netscape was going fine until Microsoft released IE for free and killed their market. According to jwz, what really killed Netscape was when their acquisition of another company. The new employees gained from the acquisition ended up in charge of the entire product division, declared that they were going to rewrite the browser from scratch, and Netscape entered an irreversible tailspin.
That certainly makes sense, and Joel also argued that rewriting their browser was what did them in, but I can't help but wonder if that is really the case. Consumers are notoriously fickle about paying for stuff and I am guessing that most of Zohos customers are small businesses which don't have that problem (it is the same reason 37 signals primarily sell towards business) so I think they would have selected IE even if Netscape hadn't been completely foolish.
Jamie Zawinski said something similar about Netscape. The classic story is that Netscape was going fine until Microsoft released IE for free and killed their market. According to jwz, what really killed Netscape was when their acquisition of another company. The new employees gained from the acquisition ended up in charge of the entire product division, declared that they were going to rewrite the browser from scratch, and Netscape entered an irreversible tailspin.
That certainly makes sense, and Joel also argued that rewriting their browser was what did them in, but I can't help but wonder if that is really the case. Consumers are notoriously fickle about paying for stuff and I am guessing that most of Zohos customers are small businesses which don't have that problem (it is the same reason 37 signals primarily sell towards business) so I think they would have selected IE even if Netscape hadn't been completely foolish.