Product Life Cycle

No, nothing to do with the elliptical home-gym-trainer.

Products are conceived. (Sometimes even in the back of a parked car.) They’re born. They grow. They dominate. They fade. They die. It happens again and again. That’s why they call it a cycle. Like the wheel of a bike that goes round and round, round and round, round and round.

Someone had the great idea to build AOL. It started out as a means for businesses to share electronic files, using Timeshare systems as sort of a first derivative of the Arpanet/original precepts of the internet. That idea was born in Reston, VA in the ‘80s, and just kinda plunked along for a few years until the commercial internet came along. AOL then offered anonymity, ease of use, and clever applications like chat, and its product offering...took off.

Millions adopted, paying 3 bucks an hour to be online, wired. AOL became a dominant way to ride the internet wave...only to fail to adopt, fail to innovate, whither as it folded itself into Time Warner, when it eventually began to die and produce mountains of cash as it milked its remaining years for dough. It sits today as a kind of museum relic inside of the doors of Verizon, who bought the company for scrap value as the rest of the world watched it fade into death.com.

So what’s next? Gas-powered cars? Do they fade into electric-powered clean oblivion? Wha about public school teachers in a world of unlimited online choice and A.I.-driven learning tools? What about pilots or bus drivers or taxi drivers in a world where driverless cars simply do it better than humans? All part of the product lifecycle system.