As seasoned product managers, most of us eventually have to phase out old versions and completely eliminate old products. This is called End of Life (EOL) or End of Service (EOS), and is important weed-clearing. It’s generally motivated by our internal economic needs: rebalancing resources in our product portfolio, reducing support costs, moving customers to the latest version, abandoning products that can’t pay for themselves.
As customers get more interested in hosted services and ASPs, a lot of product teams are re-conceiving their packaged software as outsourced Internet offerings. The assumptions and infrastructure needed for hosting a service, however, are very different from traditional licensed software. Hosted corporate applications need an underlying architectural layer that is missing from internal apps — but roughly consistent across ASP offerings. I’ve been calling this the “null service.” Continue reading