(This is a snapshot of my old weblog. New posts and selected republished essays can be found at raganwald.com.)
Monday, August 14, 2006
And another thing, you Software As A Service gadfly...
I already ticked you off for your agile metaprogramming posts. But it seems I need to write to you again.
I've just finished reading How to make a corporate butt pucker, and you've crossed the line this time. I read about it on one of those collaborative filtering aggregators. Why can't you guys stick to that kind of Web 2.0 mish-mashup-community-portal-culture-hub-stuff and leave the business business to us?
It seems that your VC friends aren't content to merely fund two guys in a living room, but they have the audacity, the unmitigated gall to show up in our offices here at BigCo and question why it takes us "six months just to get a change in screen layouts and another 2 months to line up the application to get ready for distribution to our customers."
This is beyond annoying, it is undermining our credibility as the authority on IT. You can't simply show up with your laptop and hack together some database-backed web application that does 90% of what our corporate systems do in front of our CEO. She doesn't understand all of the complexity behind our process and we don't have time to explain it to her.
Where are your requirements studies? Which consultant vetted your architecture? How can anyone calculate the ROI on your, what, one hour's worth of time? Where's the freakin' PowerPoint deck?!?
Worst of all, your new best friend did it with Microsoft technology. It would be soooo much easier to explain away if he'd used something business-unfriendly like Ruby on Rails, or better still, Lisp. Why do you think we encourage you kids to play with those toys? So that no-one will take your ideas seriously, that's why! Nobody will pay attention to your business ideas if they can't get past the "which database are you using" question.
Now if the CEO thought there was something wrong with our technology, we could blow her off with studies and reports. We delayed adopting Linux for years by saying it wouldn't scale. And it's easy to show that nobody uses Lisp for commercial applications. But what can we say about SQL Server, IIS, and professional hosting companies?
Thanks to this lone crank showing what can be done with our technology platform, she thinks there's something wrong with us.
And that's unforgivable.
I already ticked you off for your agile metaprogramming posts. But it seems I need to write to you again.
I've just finished reading How to make a corporate butt pucker, and you've crossed the line this time. I read about it on one of those collaborative filtering aggregators. Why can't you guys stick to that kind of Web 2.0 mish-mashup-community-portal-culture-hub-stuff and leave the business business to us?
It seems that your VC friends aren't content to merely fund two guys in a living room, but they have the audacity, the unmitigated gall to show up in our offices here at BigCo and question why it takes us "six months just to get a change in screen layouts and another 2 months to line up the application to get ready for distribution to our customers."
This is beyond annoying, it is undermining our credibility as the authority on IT. You can't simply show up with your laptop and hack together some database-backed web application that does 90% of what our corporate systems do in front of our CEO. She doesn't understand all of the complexity behind our process and we don't have time to explain it to her.
Where are your requirements studies? Which consultant vetted your architecture? How can anyone calculate the ROI on your, what, one hour's worth of time? Where's the freakin' PowerPoint deck?!?
Worst of all, your new best friend did it with Microsoft technology. It would be soooo much easier to explain away if he'd used something business-unfriendly like Ruby on Rails, or better still, Lisp. Why do you think we encourage you kids to play with those toys? So that no-one will take your ideas seriously, that's why! Nobody will pay attention to your business ideas if they can't get past the "which database are you using" question.
Now if the CEO thought there was something wrong with our technology, we could blow her off with studies and reports. We delayed adopting Linux for years by saying it wouldn't scale. And it's easy to show that nobody uses Lisp for commercial applications. But what can we say about SQL Server, IIS, and professional hosting companies?
Thanks to this lone crank showing what can be done with our technology platform, she thinks there's something wrong with us.
And that's unforgivable.
