The Figures and the Triggers, page-48

This is software not Cable TV.

But you are not correct with regard to software or cable. Microsoft bundles Outlook, Excel, Word, Power Point and Notes into a bundled product called Microsoft Office. You may have heard of it!

Bill Gates realized the potential and competitive advantage of bundling enterprise software products as far back as 1988 (see his speech at COMDEX in August 1988). He launched a preliminary version of Office soon after that. Microsoft has centered its Enterprise software sales strategy around Office since then and has continued to add products to the Office bundle (sometimes called suite, but Bill called it a bundle) since then, Microsoft Office has been the single most successful enterprise software sale of all time and has morphed smoothly into a SAAS bundle called Microsoft Office 365 with bundles that now also includes products such as Access, Publisher, Skype, and will eventually include Teams.

Adobe has bundled Acrobat PDF pro, Photoshop, Illustrator and others into a bundle called Creative Cloud. Bundles account for the vast majority of sales.

Salesforce.com has bundled dozens of products into a core bundled product offering ranging from the original CRM product to IPQ (sales and billing), sevicecloud (customer service), IQ (AI sales and service) etc etc. Some products are developed in house and some are acquisitions which are then added to the bundled sale. Sales force sells very few stand alone products (the least bundled product is Salesforce Essentials which includes CRM and SF Einstein) . SalesForce was one of dozens of CRM companies in 1999, it emerged as the winner (beating out Oracle etc) and part of the reason was that they embraced the Bill Gates strategy of creating a bundled offering of related products. The greater their market share, the more they invested in the bundle, extending their competitive advantage.

Neither Microsoft, Adobe or Salesforce have ever struck me as companies that "smack of desperation, discounting and poor quality sales teams".

If you are a cable TV company, and you cannot bundle that offering with internet and voice.......then in the US you are dead! ,