Jack of all, master of none

I was at this interesting training program a couple of weeks ago called 'Developing Value Propositions for New Offerings' when Professor Dipak Jain, Dean of Kellogg said something quite insightful.

He said that the reason that 2 in 1's or different products (features) that are put together in one offering do not succeed is that the trajectory in which the two technologies move is different so it is hard to have something that is best in class in both especially as we move to different versions. A good example of this could be the Camera and Music phones - you can always get a much better Camera than the one on your cell phone and you can also get a much better music device. So the cell phone is the Jack of All trades but the master of none.

I'm sure there are examples that might disprove this but the moral perhaps is that if you do one best thing you can be immensely successful - Sony Walkman, Apple IPOD - and can contine to be the leader at the frontier of that particular technology.

Food for thought that.