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."

Comments

Nicely put. Extrapolating, we get ...

[Snork Asaurus]

For example a company will make an operating system that people have used for years through a command line. Everyone knows how to use it and applications fly. But, some bright spark thinks that command lines are passe and insists on "updating" the operating system. They spend LOTS of money developing some gui interface, worse yet, some browser based interface to the operating system.

Suddenly, the operating system is slower than molasses, going up hill on a cold day. No one knows how to navigate the new interface and productivity takes a major dive.

Naturally, the bright sparks insist the problem is old hardware and the world spends another fortune upgrading equipment to get performance back to where it was before. It's a total waste of time and money, not to mention that it pisses off the user community in a major way.