Whenever we have thanked these men and women for what they have done for us, without exception they have expressed gratitude for having the chance to help - because they grew as they served.

You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn't care.

When the functionality of a product or service overshoots what customers can use, it changes the way companies have to compete. When the product isn't yet good enough, the way you compete is by making better products. In order to make better products, the architecture of the product has to be interdependent and proprietary in character.

If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.

Because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.

If I know what to spec, and I can measure it, and there are no unpredictable interdependencies between what you do and what I must do in response, then an economist would say that is sufficient information for a market to emerge between you and me.

Ultimately, when you come up with a classification scheme that is collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive, then the theory can become what Kuhn called a paradigm.