Protecting a money stream

Forgive me for channeling Seth Godin for a moment.

Too often a company goes broke trying to protect their revenue stream. Once a company has found a source of income they become almost single minded in their focus on retaining it.

No one ever won a war trying to protect the land they'd captured.

And so it goes for revenue. If your company is going to survive it's going to have to continually find new products, new customers and new sources of revenue because eventually the conditions that got you where you are will go away.

At the moment the shining example of this is eBay, and it doesn't help that they didn't deserve much of their revenue stream in the first place.

eBay built their empire by courting two types of sellers, those that sold whatever they could find and those with a regular product source. Initially those sellers with a product source were simply happy to have a place to sell online, but as new opportunities (Yahoo Stores, Amazon, etc) arose it wasn't worth it to stick with eBay because of the yard sale sellers. Was it going to go any other way?

As a response to losing sellers eBay introduced new features without addressing the reputation of their sellers. So began their death spiral. Rather than innovating and looking for new revenue sources they focused on protecting the one they had, even if it never really wanted to be on eBay.

eBay isn't dead of course, but they've had to take drastic measures to maintain their revenue. They're still losing sellers and only recently started thinking outside the box but for many it's too little to late.