GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore
Releasing trapped value drives the adoption of disruptive technology and subsequent category development. The trapped part inspires the technical innovation while the value part funds the business. As targeted trapped value gets released, the remaining value is held in place by a secondary set of traps, calling for a second generation of innovation, and a second round of businesses. This pattern continues until all the energy in the system is exhausted, and the economic priority shifts from growth to maintenance.
Take cloud computing for example. Amazon and Salesforce were early disrupters. The trapped value in retail was consumer access anytime anywhere. The trapped value in SaaS CRM was a corporate IT model that prioritized forecasting and reporting applications for upper management over tools for improving sales productivity in the trenches. As their models grew in success, however, they outgrew the data center operating model upon which they were based, and that was creating problems for both companies.
Help came from an unexpected quarter. Consumer computing, led by Google and Facebook, tackled the trapped value in the data center model by inventing the data-center-as-a-computer operation. The trapped value was in computers and network equipment that was optimized for scaling up to get more power. The new model relentlessly focused on commoditizing both, with stripped-down compute blocks and software-enabled switching—much to the consternation of the established hardware vendors who had no easy place to retreat to.
Their situation was further exacerbated by the rise of hyperscaler compute vendors who offered to outsource the entire enterprise footprint. But as they did, the value trap moved again, and this time it was the hyperscaler pricing model that was holding things back, particularly when switching costs were high. That has given rise to a hybrid architecture which at present is muddling its way through to a moderating norm. Here companies like Equinix and Digital Realty are helping enterprises combine approaches to find their optimal balance.
As this norm takes over more and more of the playing field, we may approach an asymptote of releasable trapped value at the computing layer. If so, that just means it will migrate elsewhere—in this case, up the stack. We are already seeing this in at least three areas of hypergrowth today:
- Cybersecurity, where the trapped value is in patching together component subsystems to address ongoing exposure to catastrophic risk.
- Content generation, where the trapped value is in time to market, as well as unfulfilled demand, for fresh digital media, both in consumer markets and in the enterprise.
- Co-piloting, where the trapped value is in low-yielding engagement with high-value digital services due to topic complexity and the lack of sophistication on the part of the end user.
All three of these opportunities will push further innovation in cloud computing, but the higher margins will now migrate to the next generation.
The net of all this is a fundamental investment thesis that applies equally well to venture investing, enterprise spending, and personal wealth management. As the Watergate pair of Woodward and Bernstein taught us many decades ago, Follow the money! In this case, the money is in the trapped value, so before you invest in any context, first identify the trapped value that when released will create the ROI you are looking for, and then monitor the early stages to determine if indeed it is getting released, and if so, that a fair share of the returns are coming back to you.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
Image Credit: Pixabay
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