The janitor strategy

Charge to clean up a mess you made (or someone else if you don’t have the funds to create the mess):

Over the following years VMWare justifiably grew rapidly; data centers could get multiple times the performance from the exact same amount of hardware. The problem for VMWare, though, is that the idea was such a good one that everyone copied it: first other software products like Windows Virtual PC, and then Intel and AMD implemented support in processors directly, which allowed Linux and Windows to implement support natively. By 2008 VMWare was missing its growth forecasts and EMC, which acquired VMWare in 2004, fired Greene and replaced her with former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz; two weeks later Maritz made VMWare’s “bare-metal” virtualization product free and focused the company on selling virtualization management tools and services to large enterprises, to tremendous success.

Google Cloud Changes CEOs, Layers of Surprise (or Not), The VMWare Analogy