I worked at a company that was using a product from a small Swiss company called Day Software. We were one of the larger customers of the company. They decided to entirely rewrite the software to be totally open source and JSR-170 compliant. Bold move. Would mean a pain in the ass conversion for existing customers IF they could do it.

I told a lot of people if they could rewrite the software and IT WORKED, this would be the best investment of their life. If it didn't work, they would be screwed.

All of Day's current and future customers held off on buying because they knew the next gen version was coming out within a year. Why would anyone buy?

Sales tanked, the bashers came out in full force, but guess what? The product was great. It was really great.

Adobe stepped in shortly after and bought the whole company as sales took off. Today, Day Software is the backbone of Adobe's Marketing Cloud platform.