Reinventing the wheel
I was recently chatting with my colleague Etan about how it's ludicrous that some of the bigger tech companies in Silicon Valley (and beyond) build all software in-house. This means that while everything from file sharing, to collaboration, to idea generation and money tracking are all viable web-based services, tech monoliths basically take it upon themselves to reinvent the wheel, time and again.
Think back 15 years or so, and there were definitely good reasons for all this: firstly, many of the highly useful online services simply didn't exist back in the day. No doing your taxes online with Turbo Tax, no chatting with your colleagues via Yammer, and certainly no checking in with Foursquare. The same applies to back-end magic, too: no WordPress for blogging, no Drupal or Joomla for content management, and no Ruby on Rails for rapid webapp development. So it's definitely understandable that as different needs arose, companies took it upon themselves to step in, foot the bill, and very often push the envelope.
App ubiquity
But no longer. We're in the 21st century, people, and every need that can be conceived of has a matching web service or tool out in the ether. Yes, there really is an app for that.
Which is why I find it so ridiculous that companies are clinging to legacy file sharing systems, totally clunky conference call services, and outdated and burdensome security protocols. In an age where two guys in a garage can make Goliath-slaying software, it simply doesn't make sense to hold on to old - and let's face it, expensive - tools when better options are out in the wild. There's no need to reinvent the wheel when evolution is just as good, and freely available.
Acquire me this
Let's be fair to the big guys, though. Many companies do identify a need and end up buying a smaller company (or two) that fills it. This is good thinking: why invest time and energy when someone else has already done it? Everyone from Amazon to Cisco to Google to Intuit to Schlumberger to Yahoo does this, often to great success - but often ending up with a sprawling network of badly integrated portfolio companies and a more confused consumer offering.
When integration works, it's great: I still use Turbo Tax and couldn't give a hoot that it's now owned by Intuit (:: yawn ::). Similarly, Flickr still runs well under Yahoo, and Zappos hasn't visibly changed post-Amazon takeover. When it doesn't work, though, it can be a disaster, and the oil industry (aka Schlumberger, BP and others) is a case in point: I know for a fact that oil analysts often have to deal with dozens of data streams coming from different sources, often badly integrated, most oftentimes not. And while it's easy to point a finger at big oil, other industries suffer from this bloatedness as well: certain film industry companies suffer from 6+ month training regimes for new employees, simply because the range of different, clunkily-integrated tools that need to be learned is so vast. Definitely not efficient.
Security? Whatever.
Another main reason I hear that companies build stuff in-house - even buying companies and rebuilding their product offering from scratch - revolves around security. Data security, uptime security, offline security, web security; you name it, the reason for not just using an outside tool exists. But here's the thing: it's not like we aren't already using web-based tools to transmit, monitor and manage sensitive information, because we are. Turbo Tax knows all about my 2009 income, Mint has a window into everything I own, and HighRise has a finger on the pulse of my deal flow. So is there some argument that my individual security needs are not the same (or as important) as those of a company on the Fortune 100 list?
Puh-lease.
Centralization and issues of scale (the most common big company needs) made sense in a time when hardware was scarce and security protocols minimal. But now the opposite is true: hardware is free, information is totally decentralized via the web, and it takes no more effort to secure one person's information than it does 10,000. Sure, sometimes logging in to multiple online services can be a pain (and assumes you're online to begin with), but it's not that big of a drag - is it?
Organizations large and small would do well to jump on the webapp bandwagon and prevent the needless reinvention of the wheel. Evolution is where it's at.Reinventing the wheel
I was recently chatting with my colleague Etan about how it's ludicrous that some of the bigger tech companies in Silicon Valley (and beyond) build all software in-house. This means that while everything from file sharing, to collaboration, to idea generation and money tracking are all viable web-based services, tech monoliths basically take it upon themselves to reinvent the wheel, time and again.
Think back 15 years or so, and there were definitely good reasons for all this: firstly, many of the highly useful online services simply didn't exist back in the day. No doing your taxes online with Turbo Tax, no chatting with your colleagues via Yammer, and certainly no checking in with Foursquare. The same applies to back-end magic, too: no WordPress for blogging, no Drupal or Joomla for content management, and no Ruby on Rails for rapid webapp development. So it's definitely understandable that as different needs arose, companies took it upon themselves to step in, foot the bill, and very often push the envelope.
App ubiquity
But no longer. We're in the 21st century, people, and every need that can be conceived of has a matching web service or tool out in the ether. Yes, there really is an app for that.
Which is why I find it so ridiculous that companies are clinging to legacy file sharing systems, totally clunky conference call services, and outdated and burdensome security protocols. In an age where two guys in a garage can make Goliath-slaying software, it simply doesn't make sense to hold on to old - and let's face it, expensive - tools when better options are out in the wild. There's no need to reinvent the wheel when evolution is just as good, and freely available.
Acquire me this
Let's be fair to the big guys, though. Many companies do identify a need and end up buying a smaller company (or two) that fills it. This is good thinking: why invest time and energy when someone else has already done it? Everyone from Amazon to Cisco to Google to Intuit to Schlumberger to Yahoo does this, often to great success - but often ending up with a sprawling network of badly integrated portfolio companies and a more confused consumer offering.
When integration works, it's great: I still use Turbo Tax and couldn't give a hoot that it's now owned by Intuit (:: yawn ::). Similarly, Flickr still runs well under Yahoo, and Zappos hasn't visibly changed post-Amazon takeover. When it doesn't work, though, it can be a disaster, and the oil industry (aka Schlumberger, BP and others) is a case in point: I know for a fact that oil analysts often have to deal with dozens of data streams coming from different sources, often badly integrated, most oftentimes not. And while it's easy to point a finger at big oil, other industries suffer from this bloatedness as well: certain film industry companies suffer from 6+ month training regimes for new employees, simply because the range of different, clunkily-integrated tools that need to be learned is so vast. Definitely not efficient.
Security? Whatever.
Another main reason I hear that companies build stuff in-house - even buying companies and rebuilding their product offering from scratch - revolves around security. Data security, uptime security, offline security, web security; you name it, the reason for not just using an outside tool exists. But here's the thing: it's not like we aren't already using web-based tools to transmit, monitor and manage sensitive information, because we are. Turbo Tax knows all about my 2009 income, Mint has a window into everything I own, and HighRise has a finger on the pulse of my deal flow. So is there some argument that my individual security needs are not the same (or as important) as those of a company on the Fortune 100 list?
Puh-lease.
Centralization and issues of scale (the most common big company needs) made sense in a time when hardware was scarce and security protocols minimal. But now the opposite is true: hardware is free, information is totally decentralized via the web, and it takes no more effort to secure one person's information than it does 10,000. Sure, sometimes logging in to multiple online services can be a pain (and assumes you're online to begin with), but it's not that big of a drag - is it?
Organizations large and small would do well to jump on the webapp bandwagon and prevent the needless reinvention of the wheel. Evolution is where it's at.