Why it pays to kill your babies

Like many people, I am extremely proud of the products my company sells. I believe that our software tools make it possible for clever designers to create equipment that only a few years ago might have existed only in the imagination of science fiction writers to be used by Captain Kirk and his ilk.

Which makes it all the more difficult when I, together with my colleagues, am told to 'de-emphasise' a favoured, best-selling, much-loved product. After all, this is the tool that has paid our wages for so long, enabled me to win the bonus that paid for that holiday in the sun or new car, and put our kids through school. We all invest a lot of ourselves in a product, and to be told that it is no longer 'strategic', or that it has been 'superseded', can lead to a real feeling of loss.

You might be tempted to say "Get a Life", and you'd be right, because no matter how successful a product has been there is no room for sentiment - a healthy company must always move forward.

In fact, the seeds of a product's eventual replacement should be sown even before the current model has been introduced. In my company, Avant!, we have whole teams of designers working in separate locations doing just that. Even though we pride ourselves on being the leaders in the field, we know that if we don't "kill our own babies" by introducing better products, someone else will.

If you look at it dispassionately, it's obvious. Who better than the inventor of a product to architect its natural successor? When you've lived with a product, you know both its strengths and its weaknesses. You have valuable installed user base feedback to analyse and market research ready to hand.

But on the other hand, you can get too close to a project. You start answering necessary questions such as "Why have we done it this way?" with the peevish and inexcusable "Because we always have". Product introductions become mere upgrades, rather than real, significant steps forward that deliver 'must-buy' features and benefits. And before you know it, your baby - which used to be a bright and wondrous thing - is ponderous, overloaded with unnecessary code and failing to cut it with the new wonderkids on the block.

So you have to be tough. At Avant!, we had a team of highly skilled architects and engineers working apart from the rest of the company for three years to develop products to replace our own market-leading Apollo-II place and route integrated circuit design tool. Astro was introduced early in 2001, but let me tell you now; we're already working on new approaches. When the time is ready, we know that we'll have to be ready with Astro's replacement - and it had better be good, or we'll be the ones who get left behind as yesterday's men.

Society's demands have made its designers and engineers hungry for technology. So technology companies must be prepared to keep moving - keeping the best of what they have and replacing outdated ideas with new ones. Maybe then we are not "killing our babies". A better analogy might be that just as with children, products must be given the freedom to develop and take onboard new ideas and influences, sometimes in the process becoming almost unrecognisable from when they first appeared.

• Avant! Corporation
  e106@industrialnetworking.co.uk