My wife and I are considering a major renovation to our home and I found myself thinking about the likely impact on our property value. The "conventional wisdom" says that bathrooms and kitchens offer the highest return on investment.

And that got me thinking about the concept of "conventional wisdom". Conventional wisdom, in my opinion, is simply an excuse for people not to have to think too hard about the decisions they need to make. "Do the safe thing," they all say. "Nobody ever got fired for buying ______."

Now, speaking as a former marketing person, CW is your friend. If you can elevate your solution or your brand to the glorious pinnacle of "conventional wisdom", all the market mojo is on your side. It becomes much easier to sell your product because your audience already accepts its value. Of course, this usually doesn't happen for companies with revenues less than $1B.

On the other hand, as a product manager, CW is the enemy. Once you become comfortable that your solution rocks, then you must resist the inertial drag of success and continue to look for ways to make it better. Or for technologies that could displace it. One of the hardest things to do as a product manager is to continue to worry about how you're going to make your own successful product obsolete, even though you know there are competitors out there working hard to do just that.

My personal theory is that, when it comes to IT security, a concept is pretty much obsolete as by the time the market labels it "conventional wisdom". Our market moves too fast via aggressive innovation for any new concept to survive unchallenged and unchanged for too long. Even in the mature security sub-markets of firewalls and anti-virus, there is still innovation in the form of packaging and update mechanisms. Not to mention the coalescence of adjacent technologies like IPS and spyware.

And I don't think this is a bad thing, BTW. Innovation followed by evolution and then widespread adoption is a tried-and-true market curve. In this day and age, I just don't trust any pure security solution that labels itself as "conventional wisdom".

Of course, my wife and I are going to update our kitchen and bathrooms, so what do I know?