A bible approach of the marketing:
About Product End of Life and the sacrifice of Yitzhak
Guy Saadon

28.03.2011

To invest time and efforts on Product End of life (EOL): Who has time for this? Who needs this?
Is it not a waste of time when we have so many tasks to face with the present and the future?
To better understand this question, let's call our dear old Abraham and Yitzhak and let's focus especially on the harder trial of life of Abraham, the sacrifice of Yitzhak.
Note: in this context we will not try to explain and understand this trial but more limit our interest on how it can help us to better understand the necessity for End of Life process. How can we understand Abraham? His entire life was to fight against idolatry and human sacrifices. And when
God asks him to sacrifice his "favorite" son, he does not hesitate to do it! Still today, this remains for me a mystery.
Most of the ideas I will explain here are taken from the kabala. Some are more personal view.
Abraham represents the kindness, the grace, the infinite love and generosity. In Canaan, Abraham was inviting in his hut everyone and his tent was opened in every direction.
Yitzhak is less popular and represents the severity, the fear and heroism at the same time. He was aware that Abraham would sacrifice him and he overcame his fear.
In a certain way, Yitzhak is the second generation of serving God. Abraham was serving with Mercy, kindness and Yitzhak is serving with fear, with laws, with limits.
But Abraham has a difficulty to understand this. The love, the grace is infinite and Abraham is fundamentally universal. He wants to bring everyone to recognize and serve God. When Yitzhak is becoming an adult (at the moment of the Sacrifice, he is 37 years old), Abraham does not really understand the necessary for the values Yitzhak is representing, i.e. fear, limit and laws.
It is a somehow comparable to someone who has brilliant ideas for new inventions and he does not really see why a financial and an account manager are necessary. The contrary, these guys are just annoying him to create and invent new products. They are thinking with numbers when the brilliant man has new ideas every day.
The creative people often have difficulties to respect the pure managers or controllers, when the later are always telling: "Thanks I am here. Without me, the ideas of this creative "Coucou" would have still been at the level of a prototype."
This is the perpetual conflict between Creative and Manager people.
With his infinite love, Abraham is a kind of creative, the most famous startup of the world:
Monotheism.
But with Abraham, it is getting further. Abraham sees even Yitzhak and his rules as dangerous. If there are rules and some justice in this world, the world will not be able to bare it. He will be
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destroyed. Human race is just made of flesh and blood! Abraham wants to create a world that is only based on generosity.
But God is trying to tell Abraham: A specific nation to deal the monotheism is necessary. Yitzhak will go on the project of this nation. For instance, the circumcision Abraham has done at 99 years old was very difficult for his universal approach. He was afraid to become less universal and touch less people. So Abraham in a certain way, with his vision of serving God, does not want to quit the scene and let the place to Yitzhak to go on the project of the nation who will serve God and transport this idea in the world.
The exact translation of "Sacrifice of Yitzhak" is "ligature or binding of Yitzhak". In a certain way, the idea Yitzhak is representing is bounded and cannot move forward. Abraham is occupying the entire scene… This is going so far that God has to test Abraham and ask him to sacrifice his loved son and only when he is about to kill him, he suddenly understands his enormous mistake and instead of his son, he is sacrificing a ram: an adult and not a young one.
This is here to explain that this sacrifice is in fact, the sacrifice of Abraham and not of Yitzhak. Only then, Abraham is going out of the history and Yitzhak is taking his real place.
This has enormous effect on the entire humanity, even up to now but in our limited case, we may understand that without making permanent End of life of old product, old versions, this may kill our capacity to renew ourselves, our portfolio, our ability to stay creative.
In the Telecom Company I was working, I really fight to give high priority to this task. Of course, I didn't speak about Abraham (maybe my mistake) but explained that our competition Alcatel-Lucent or Huawei have a lot of EOL announcements in their Internet sites. In Huawei, in some periods, nearly half of the published official documents were EOL announcements.
Doing nothing, means you have to support indefinitely (In respect with Customers' agreements) the product even if it is only for critical bugs. This means at least minimum Tier2, Tier3 support and even maybe few R&D people to be able to support the product if some of the components cannot be found in the market.
When I made it, our customers have understood and accepted the process. And when the support period was over, some few customers with large install base, really want some extension of support and have paid to get it. In our side, in order to stay focus on our present and future activity, we have given this task to outsourcing and even generate some money from this specific EOL task. But mainly, we have avoided the situation when the old generation is "sacrificing" the new one…and do not allow us to focus on the new generation.
This approach has to be attenuated sometimes; a company may need to maintain longer the present generation family to keep their customers until the new generation and new offer is ready and thus avoid the competition to get into. For long term, maintaining indefinitely your old family is never healthy to your company and can really endanger the future of your company.
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Of course, the Abraham's case is extreme but thanks to this, I hope now, we clearly understand how not making EOL can even endanger our dreams.

About Guy Saadon: With more than 10 years of experience as product manager in the Telecom
International arena, in the very dynamic Israeli high-tech market, I have always maintained a small but permanent place for my passion: the bible (after my family of course…).
To contact me: guysaadon8@gmail.com