“Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, A little folding of the hands to sleep: So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth; And thy want as an armed man.” -Proverbs 24:33–34
For decades, people thought it was impossible to run a mile in under 4 minutes. Then in 1954, Roger Bannister did it. Bannister set his record of 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds.
As the record was considered unbreakable for decades, people assumed the new record would also go unbroken for a few more decades.
Wrong.
46 days after Bannister’s record, John Landy from Australia ran a 3:57.9 mile.
And soon after, more and more runners chipped away at the record, bringing it lower and lower.
It’s like the Ancient Greek story of the Sword of Damocles: a young courtier, Damocles, once told the King how great it must be to be King. So, the King let Damocles take the throne for a day. Damocles was elated to be sitting there – until he looked up and saw a sword above his head, dangling from the ceiling by a thread.
The moral being, the throne is often just a place where you sit while waiting to lose your throne.
Nothing is forever.
Which brings us to today – May 5th, 2025. The final day of Skype‘s 22-year journey. In the early 2000s, Skype revolutionized how we connected. It shrunk the world. Made distance irrelevant. Video calls that once seemed like science fiction became mundane.
What happened?
- The platform was purchased by Microsoft, a company with massive knowhow and technical prowess. Yet they never seemed to care about Skype quite as much as those who founded it. They never really did much with it. They let it sit there, like a wallflower at the dance.
- A pandemic happened. Zoom positioned itself to meet the swell in demand for fast, cheap, high-quality video conferencing. The world changed, Skype didn’t.
- Microsoft lost sight of Skype’s core value proposition, adding more and more features that customers could do without and spending less time on the unglamorous work of fixing bugs and updating core functions.
And that’s it. That’s all it took. A little bit of complacency, “A little folding of the hands to sleep.”
But here’s the gift: success is not an event, it’s an infinite game. No market position is eternally secure. No product is too good to be replaced. No athlete too good to be beaten.
Great cultures don’t win on autopilot. They reinvent before they have to.
The greatest danger isn’t disruption from the outside, but forgetting what made you extraordinary in the first place.
Tomorrow, it could be you.
