Ask HN: What Should an Incumbent Do?

A client of mine is software company with a portfolio of predominantly desktop solutions for use in heavy industry.

They moved to a subscription model a few years ago, which in hindsight was probably a mistake as it left a bad taste in their customers mouth. Now as with many other niche software vendors we seem to be hitting this inflection point where the level of effort required to clone the product is low enough to justify it despite the relatively small market.

I’m getting asked by the leadership team what they should be doing to help them navigate this, but I’m struggling to come up with anything. Is anyone else navigating this at the moment and got any good ideas or places to start? One option is pivoting more towards consulting, but that would lead to a lot of redundancies on the development side.