I'm doing some work now on the anatomy of a transition. By the time people figure out how to adopt a technology, they also figure out how to leverage a lot of the old assets. The differentiation comes into the architecture. If everybody deploys SAP or everybody deploys Siebel, that's not going to be your competitive advantage. But the way you use it and the way you connect it to different systems - that keeps you unique.

IBM is the ultimate example. IBM has reinvented itself many times. It was never a single idea but always this amorphous process. In some ways, what the company is doing now is the same as what it was doing in the 1960s. It's leveraging the Fortune 500 companies. That's still its basic model. IBM has gone from leasing mainframes to outsourcing and has done it very well.

The old saw, "Watch out CIO, technology is going to come to kill you, so you better move fast and do whatever you possibly can to react quickly" is gone. I'm not even sure it was ever really true. I still haven't seen a company that's been slaughtered by technology. The companies that have done worse in the past 10 years have been the ones that overreacted.

So it doesn't necessarily pay to be the first mover in regard to new technologies?

There is no evidence whatsoever that first-mover advantage is good for you. Look at the numbers across industries. It's not first to move, but first to scale. Yahoo wasn't the first Internet directory; Infoseek was the first widely used directory. The first auction site wasn't eBay; others tried to do it, but eBay got the architecture and business model right and scaled up first. Now that it is to scale, eBay closes 55 per cent to 60 per cent of its auctions. The number-two site [Yahoo] closes less than 10 per cent.

Is that part of what went wrong with Polaroid?

What went wrong wasn't the technology. Polaroid has been dying a slow death since 1988. Companies get hurt for all sorts of reasons: poor management, inertia, they don't want to change the business model or the organisation, they may have blind spots. Polaroid had a blind spot around marketing.

It made a bunch of mistakes, but you can't say that digital photography killed Polaroid. It had a lot of assets in digital photography. You could say it even overreacted to it. It was the company's inability to change to a business model that adapted Polaroid outside of its traditional products.

How has the relationship between technology and strategy changed during the past few years?

The biggest change is the evolution in couplings between technologies. What you see now is more loosely coupled technologies and the ability to exchange data without [requiring] a unifying architecture. We're starting to realise the power of plugging a lot of different things together, in contrast to having a single, monolithic architecture. We're getting better at managing technology diversity. You don't want to have a huge mess, but people are starting to learn how to manage a slight mess better and cheaper. Getting everything to work together is better than throwing everything out and starting from scratch. It's changing a lot of relationships.

If you look across industries, there's fragmentation. In the early days, one company owned most of the assets required to design and deliver a product. As industry evolves, there's more integration of assets from a variety of players. You see it in the car industry, the retail space, manufacturing or wherever. My students and I are spending a lot of time looking at that now in everything from PC manufacturing to semiconductors to pharmaceuticals to apparel.