Now, this is interesting. In the history of some large enterprise software companies, there were some features that they really wanted to retire from their products, but the first few couple of times they tried to retire it, one of their big corporate customers paid them to keep it going, so they changed their mind and accepted the money. Now, quite intuitively, we can know that this is wrong, but the question is how do you firmly say “no” to those customers?
First of all, you have to remind yourself think about why you wanted to deprecate that obsolete feature. The obsolete feature no longer makes sense in the modern world because it’s just yet another way of doing things. The feature was originally developed because it was thought that nothing else existed at the time. But, in the modern context, a much more mainstream way of doing that thing has emerged, and you honestly don’t want to keep doing that thing in your incompatible, non-standard, in-house developed way. Simply by creating less inconsistency in the abstract symbolism used to leverage that feature, you make everyone’s lives easier. Most importantly, it makes yourself more efficient, more capable of moving forward faster to the actual new features that people want, and ultimately a better participant in the modern economy, serving more people with less work.
So, let’s revisit the premise we’ve first described. You have this obsolete feature that you know you want to get rid of for the better of the entire world, but this one really big customer comes to you and offers you a really big chunk of money to keep it going. The motivation of the weaker decision makers is obvious: it’s more money if you accept their offer, and more money is better, right? Wrong. It’s not more money if you accept their offer, it’s actually less. The motivation for removing the feature that we’ve just described is simple: it grows the economy. By contrast, the monetary proposition of continuing the legacy feature does not.
So, basically you have to be able to express these key points to the customer who is willing to pay you to continue a legacy feature.
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You’re offering a fixed chunk of money. It should be your goal to spend that money in the smartest way possible, and whether or not that’s your goal, it’s our goal. We’re not going to take the money if the premise of doing so is a poor monetary decision.
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Our goal is to move fast and grow fast into a market that is better for the economy at large. The startup companies that we’re competing against are not being given such large monetary offers, so we don’t need it either. Matter of fact, we don’t want it since we want to build our company to be natively competitive with those startup companies.
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Because we’re developing a feature that grows the economy, we’ll end up earning much more money in the long run than you’re offering in the short run.
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With that much money you’re offering, you can instead spend that money on a consulting company that will get you migrated off the legacy feature.