Froth and truth

I forget which hotel we met in.  It was very close to the former Lotus headquarters near Kendall Square, Cambridge.  The meeting was to define and begin to pursue the technical direction of the Lotus brand within IBM, who had recently purchased the brand and its products.  It was attended by the veterans of the PC-based software offerings of the 1980s and 90s, Lotus 1-2-3 and the encompassing suite, Lotus Smartsuite (still for sale on Amazon for $169 US).  I was there with other architects from the Iris contingent, creators of Lotus Notes and Domino. 

It had the feeling of a sales meeting.  The froth of the proponents of the new Horizon software – a consummation of a love affair with the Java language and its ecology – was over the top.  We would build this new stuff for customers we hadn’t seen yet but they would be cool because they would embrace our cool software.  The were Horizon customers – the kind that pundits interview and write about.  

What came from that was – in my monetary estimate (not too far off) – a $2B debacle.  The lack of experience with the Java, what it was good and what it was not good at – became the epitaph of the work which proceeded from that meeting and others like it.  The Agile process was adopted because of the unaccountable overruns and dishonest look-good reports that marked the massive effort.

Now, there is a life cycle of all technologies that ends with their replacement with the newer and better.  I don’t write as a Luddite who remembers the good old days, except that they were building blocks to everything we will ever have.  At the very least, we learn how NOT to do something.  But no, I celebrate real advancement and breakthroughs as the pinnacle of industrial and life-enhancing human achievement.   

The tribal economics of large corporation fuels the air with low- to mid-level animosity.  If I can convince management to invest in my ideas – which fulfill standards, use the latest cool and shiny tooling and widgetry and have the promise of winning new business – I also convince management to defund and obsolesce that which currently brings in the revenues which feed my dreamy experimentation with all its giddy enthusiasm.  Because, long-term, who needs those dinosaur products?

It is astounding how the purported visionaries go from failure to spectacular failure and still convince non-technical holders of the corporate purse strings to keep investing in their beautiful slideware.  The rate of failure of new ventures is high, but if the same claims of radical value and enormous savings are repeatedly proclaimed in much the same way, dissolution of processes or groups is only sensible.  Instead, investment in what truly has proven value plummets continually and permanently. 

Obvious evidence is that small groups of entrepreneurial techies have the greatest market success.  They also have the greatest failure.  Contrasting the size of the groups and their corporate setting to the large armies of unaccountable technical would-be generals should be best practice for all would-be investors.  Of course venture capitalists know this and their 5% success rate pays them all they need.  But decision maker in large corporations almost never have this mentality.  They would do well to recall the seminal days of their now-huge business.

Yes, I’m retired.  Yes, I worked for most of my career on cash-cow software.  So I risk being understood as some bitter codger with an ax to grind.  Not so.  If there is wisdom in years, it has value.  And I care about the industry and work that fed my family. 

There is good health in skepticism towards the loudest claims of the new and flashy.  I pick on no particular tech; I pick on it all.  It’s good business to hang back 5-10 years and letting dust settle, because the more dust, the less clear and factual the vision really is.

About this topic:

For a long time, I’ve wanted to write this.  I don’t want it to read as a memoir because the phenomenon I want to write about still exists and will continue as long as the software business, and really high tech at large, exists.  I don’t want to denigrate individuals – people do what they can to advance careers and stay gainfully employed.  But goes into the invention and propagation of untruths, often using hyperbole, to sell yet-to-be-realized benefits of pet technology whose prominence and sales serves to benefit an individual or group.  It must be said that other groups are left behind, their projects and products defunded and eventually discarded.