Yesterday I wrote about companies that have shifted from their initial niche into the "everything" business; Amazon did this effectively, but I doubt Best Buy can pull this off.
I'd like to draw a sharp distinction between this and companies that expand their niche within their industry. Voxeo, which is one of my favorite companies, has a nice of automating inbound and outbound telephone calls. Now that people expect to interact using instant messaging and the like, Voxeo just purchased Imified, a company that specializes in automating instant messages.
I've created applications that combine speech recognition over the phone with instant messages — trust me, if you're trying to get flight information from a machine or a human, it's far easier to get that over the phone. Voxeo will certainly integrate Imified's capabilities with their own, and I expect to be able to send and receive instant messages while on the phone, or make launch telephone calls from within an IM applications. Now that's expanding your niche, not a dilution of brand name.
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