The Safe Pick

This is a saying among corporate computer buyers, with no known author. In his history of the phrase, word historian Barry Popik finds it in print by 1978, when an issue of Mini-Micro Systems already called it “the conventional wisdom.” A 1985 Dallas Morning News article called it a “20-year-old adage,” and later versions swapped in Microsoft in the 1990s and gold during the 2008 recession. The print sources are as quoted by Popik; the pages have not been independently verified.

The saying is about the buyer, who is weighing their own career along with what’s best for the company. If an industry leader like IBM fails, that’s bad luck; if the unknown startup they championed fails, that’s their judgment.

John Maynard Keynes made the same point in 1936, in chapter 12 of The General Theory. He was writing about investment funds run by “committees or boards or banks,” where, as with a corporate purchase, the person deciding is spending other people’s money. In those funds, he wrote, the investor who goes against the crowd gets the most criticism: “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”

For a startup selling to a large company, that means lowering the personal risk of saying yes: a small first purchase that is easy to undo, references from peers the buyer trusts, and a case that makes not buying look like the riskier choice. The same career politics show up on the competitor’s side: when a startup takes on a big established company, its real rival is often one product manager focused on internal politics and promotion.