Dangerous to Start Over

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 16:01:34 GMT

clipped by: asardar
clipper's remarks: Joel hits it again about why one needs to be careful if presented with the idea of restarting from scratch. Most times it will be a losing proposition.

Clip Source: www.joelonsoftware.com

Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.

There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming:

It's harder to read code than to write it.

It's important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. First of all, you probably don't even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don't actually have "more experience". You're just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren't in the original version.

Tags: software development

Apple Lead is short

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 17:52:58 GMT

clipped by: asardar
clipper's remarks: Apple is good at innovating. They need to continue to move forward. Each cash cow (ipod, itunes) will eventually be succeed by an industry of duplicators, and their comparitive advantage disappear.

Clip Source: www.businessweek.com

I don't think so. Look at any industry -- not just computers and MP3 players. You also see it in aircrafts and software, and medical devices, and over and over. During the early stages of an industry, when the functionality and reliability of a product isn't yet adequate to meet customer's needs, a proprietary solution is almost always the right solution -- because it allows you to knit all the pieces together in an optimized way.

But once the technology matures and becomes good enough, industry standards emerge. That leads to the standardization of interfaces, which lets companies specialize on pieces of the overall system, and the product becomes modular. At that point, the competitive advantage of the early leader dissipates, and the ability to make money migrates to whoever controls the performance-defining subsystem.

But let's assume Apple has learned its lesson, and that it's intent to not repeat history.

The trick is to manage the transition. [As standards take over], the products always become much lower in cost and much more broadly available [from more suppliers]. So if you're the incumbent, it appears you're facing a huge threat, even though you're really at the cusp of a great new opportunity. But it's usually new companies that grab that opportunity.

So it really is a fork in the road for Apple. If they don't open up the architecture and begin trying to be the iTunes inside all MP3 players, they're going to have to keep coming up with the next cool thing.

Clip Source: www.macworldexpo.com

Tags: apple innovation

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Dangerous to Start Over

Apple Lead is short