This is an excellent case study unfolding in real time in the A/B Testing software industry on how large incumbent products (Adobe's Omniture - Test & Target) get killed by startups (Optimizely) .
The core of the issue seems to be something called MBox (http://www.managingecommerce.com/glossary/i-n/mbox) which is a mechanism for setting up a test e.g. Does A page perform better than B page - which is the essence of A/B testing. Of course, some genius strategist comes up with "our value is driven of by the number of tests/experiments that people run so lets set our pricing strategy of that" and then over time you slowly "capture more value than you create".
And then comes a startup which calls BS on that practice because most tests don't end up anywhere & they design a really radically simpler software that is not constrained by "per test" & other artificial constraints! They win by creating more value than they capture. More background on that topic here: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/09/does-open-conflict-with-maki...
The core of the issue seems to be something called MBox (http://www.managingecommerce.com/glossary/i-n/mbox) which is a mechanism for setting up a test e.g. Does A page perform better than B page - which is the essence of A/B testing. Of course, some genius strategist comes up with "our value is driven of by the number of tests/experiments that people run so lets set our pricing strategy of that" and then over time you slowly "capture more value than you create".
And then comes a startup which calls BS on that practice because most tests don't end up anywhere & they design a really radically simpler software that is not constrained by "per test" & other artificial constraints! They win by creating more value than they capture. More background on that topic here: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/09/does-open-conflict-with-maki...