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The risk of relying on a handful of customers is not just financial. Your product also is at risk when you're at the mercy of a few big spenders. When any one customer pays you significantly more than the others, your product inevitably ends up catering mostly to that customer's specific needs.

What the customer demands is last year's model, cheaper. To find out what the customer needs you have to understand what the customer is doing as well as he understands it. Then you build what he needs and you educate him to the fact that he needs it.

When times are good, there is budget available for increased research on secondary products or customers.

All businesses tend to pass costs onto customers.

Customers are now driven by trying to optimize value.

When you are led by values, it doesn't cost your business, it helps your business.

It's really important we stay in touch with our customers and try to, over time, have more packages and flexibility than perhaps we have historically offered. And that's part of that tension that is healthy that is going on in the marketplace.

Customers are very demanding and well informed.

That's a very critical phase in customer service because you can start to really understand what part of customer service has value to customers and what part is bothering customers.

Assuming a specific resource is high cost is often a path to disruption when someone makes a different assumption.