Innovating and being successful at it is hard work. In Citrix there was plenty of innovation with the ICA protocol, XenApp, XD, Netscalar etc which gave it a clear and distinct advantage. I had an opportunity to contribute to many of these products and innovations over my stint of 20 years.
Mid size companies like Citrix also innovate by acquisition and it acquired many. Here too I had the privilege of being part of the Tech due diligence for some of these. Note, in some areas Citrix was stymied by the questionable Windows Desktop licensing when it came to DaaS. We pitched a DaaS solution even before we had a full working XD stack we were building in the background. But at the time it was hard to monitize given the lic model of the core OS.
Either way the challenge is to work out when to keep going or abandon what looked like a promising product stream initially. Something Citrix like a lot of other companies has got wrong from time to time. But it is hard to always get right given the investment both financial and human capital as well as the impact on the stock when one has to admit it's time to abandon a particular strategy.
Adding to Citrix's challenge is that the public clouds have levelled the playing field for nimble new service providers to compete in the same space as Citrix. The cloud providers like MS, AWS, Goog themselves will also continue to absorb the best of these players to enhance their DaaS as they do with so many other services.
But all is not lost. Citrix has great tech talent. It now is unshackled from the quarterly reporting cycle that can prevent bolder longer term and long lead time strategies. Batten down the hatches to take on the nimbler players in the space. Work out why they seem to be eating your lunch and boot them out of your kitchen. And if the current management team can't do this great company justice then embrace the brave new world of competition in this space.