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Pointless IT Innovations Considered Harmful
Makarand writes "According to a comment column in the guardian innovations in IT are most often simply more trouble than they are worth. Most innovations in IT today are platform specific and are easy to
come up with in the computing fields. Innovating gets easier if the platform sticks around
for a long time. These innovations accrue incompatibilities making it difficult for users to switch platforms and absorb the costs of switching to a new platform. Users will not switch to
a competitor's product if they believe that their platform will be later updated to deliver the same benefits."
You can deviate, but only if you don't force people to throw away everything else to get there.
/. has been prone to do.
There's also the issue of introducing innovations that "pollute" the standard in an attempt to hijack it, as one company often discussed on
Im sick of vendors thinking that it is ok to re-invent everything every couple of years and force all your customers to adapt to it.
Im even more sick of watching silly companies spend the re-structuring costs because they believe all the hype thats said.
Some IT departments spend all their time upgrading to get the latest versions of everything working together instead of just using what they have to its full potential.
Thats ridiculous.. just pick a technology and do something with it!
If a particular technology works for - use it! Dont let the marketing hype disuade you from using it.
Its more important to get your project done than it is to develop it on whatever someone tells you is the latest greatest technology.
-- NeTMoNGeR
This isn't innovation; this is marketing attempting to create a demand to cover the costs of developing a new technology. GM did this in the early part of the 20th century. The product drove the market demand. WHen GM developed the GTO in the '60s, the initial plan was only to produce 5000 of them. However, when they were flooded with 15,000 orders, suddenly the market demand was driving the product development. Innovation needs to provide INCREASED value to the customer at the same or REDUCED cost. "Innovation" that is expensive for users isn't innovation at all. It's creating a sustained revenue stream for the company developing the technology at the EXPENSE of the user.
Now, the MCA developed by IBM may have been innovative on a purely technical basis; however, to adopt this innovation it would have cost the end users a lot of money in terms of replacing already existing hardware that was incompatible with the new architecture. If the MCA had been made compatible with existing hardware, then it would have been innovative. (Risking exposing my hardware design naiveness here, but that's OK)
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
If we could start again from scratch, with hindsight, we might well decide to adopt the MCA bus, or something similar. Since we are not starting from scratch, we have to consider the switching costs.
PCI anyone? MCA failed because IBM made it too expensive relative to the hoads of imported clones that soon swamped the market. Yet CERN made a better bus and it was adopted under reasonable use terms. The more open standard won.
One of the many reasons that Apple lost the desktop wars was the conclusion arrived at by every rational person: that Apple was bound to lose. One day,
Apple is dying, he says. Right. I can't think of a better computer for most people to own. But that pales in comparison to the finishing touch:
One day, Microsoft could face a similar problem [that Apple supposedly suffered] with GNU/Linux. So not only must it maintain Windows' dominance, it has to maintain the perception of future dominance. In this case, of course, the answer is Microsoft.net.
Of course! Now I see the answer, all of the illogical strings above have tied my thoughts into a knot, but M$.NOT will set me free. I am free of fear and confusion knowing that M$ Office will alaways predominate, that my platoform performance and security is much less important than conforming so I don't look foolish. Yes, free from fear, uncertianty and doubt. I am a rational person and now know that market lock in is more important than standards. I'll just sit in my single window manager (AKA Windoze) prison and watch as warring companies smash all the ammenities so that nothing ever works right and what does work won't for long. I'll eat whatever new trash M$ throws into my cage.
What a laugh. It is so obvious that free code with it's transparency and freedom of modification solves all of the problems the author can dream up and that others suffered. Free software is modular, replacable and never dies. MCA runs just fine under linux and a 486 PS/2 makes an OK workstation that can effectively interoperate with more modern hardware. Under propriatory code, PS/2 is simply junk like most any older computer. Free software has been ported out to all maner of hardware and it's users can make use of anything out there, Arm to IA64. Because XFree86 is free and open, I can have any number of window managers, each vasty superior to M$, and they can all interoperate together. Even the silly painful world of M$ Office formats has been made less painful by Open Office, K Office and other free and open codes that can read that crap and extract the information out of it. It's amazing that the article started off with a very perceptive view of the evils of propriatory closed software development but ended up recomending no change except the adoption of some new M$ garbage.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.