You think we should throw away all our carefully written, tested and documented code every few years just to fit the latest fashion?
Perhaps you’ve been hanging around with hairdressers too much!
Perhaps you’ve been hanging around with hairdressers too much!
What I mean is that I’d like to avoid the position some of my competitors seem to be in: they’ve invested heavily in technology that fit an earlier version of the world well, but doesn’t fit very well into today’s world, and they have too much inertia to deviate now from their original course.
For example, their software might only work on Windows desktop machines, and any attempt they make now to move to a client-server architecture with both desktops and mobile devices as clients is some sort of awkward incomplete back-port. They might be better off if they could afford to start over.
That’s a technological paradigm shift that applies bigtime to my market. My observation is that stylists use phones more than computers. Not trying to say desktop software is a worse platform in every market…you might know a thing or two about that.
I agree with Jason, but every few years is a bit too frequent. For years the Windows platform dominated, I remember too well in the 90’s all the anti-trust against the Microsoft “monopoly”. Everyone who built software then built it for Windows (excluding enterprise type server software). But that era is over, in our industries people don’t want that software any more, they want web or iPad software. Like Jason I have moved salons away from leading industry companies (SalonIris, Shortcuts) because they don’t have competitive offerings on the new platforms. They of course always try and use the old scare tactics (who owns your data etc), but the people are speaking. You need to evaluate your platform at least every 10 years.
You are not talking about their market share, right? Their investment was actually very very good since they dominate the market now.
Unfortunately market share is not something you can replicate (see Microsoft on search and mobile, Google on social, Nokia on smartphones, and so on) but technology is easy to replicate.
So the technology doesn’t matter, only the market share!