Post-Gold Rush Development

Post-gold rush software development is characterized by more methodical, lower-risk, more capital-intensive, more labor-intensive development practices. Projects use larger teams, rely on more formal processes, adhere to more standards (compatibility with legacy code, industry-wide protocols, and so on), and work with much larger code bases. The emphasis is less on rushing software to market quickly and more on reliability, interoperability, and usability. Projects focus on software engineering considerations that hardly matter during a gold rush but that matter a lot after a technology matures.

Gold rush-style development practices have even lower odds of working in a post-gold rush phase than they did during the risky gold rush phase. In the early days of a new technology, there are few established players or products. The technological barriers to entry are low, and early products can be small, unpolished, and unreliable and still succeed. As with the California Gold Rush, fewer people and less capital are needed to stake a claim during the early days of a new technology. The first version of Word for the Macintosh was a gold rush product that consisted of just 153,000 lines of code. Two guys in a garage have a chance to compete against the major corporations when a successful product can be built with 153,000 lines of code. As the technology matures, however, the easy gold runs out, and successful companies have to compete on the basis of more capital-intensive projects.

One of the most damaging mistakes that successful gold rush companies make is to persist in using gold rush development approaches as the technology matures and their projects scale up. To compete successfully in the post-gold rush phase, the successful project needs to do a lot more than simply multiply the number of guys and get a bigger garage.

Post-gold rush customers are more demanding. Gold rush customers are what Everett M. Rogers, author of Diffusion of Innovations, calls "Innovators" and "Early Adopters."[1] They tend to be technologically savvy, drawn to new technologies, and forgiving of the rough edges that go along with them. Gold rush products can be much less polished than the products that come later and still be successful. Post-gold rush customers are what Rogers calls "Early Majority," "Late Majority," and "Laggards." They are risk averse and want polished products that work reliably. This demand sets a higher bar for post-gold rush products. The current version of Word for Windows, a post-gold rush product, consists of more than 5,000,000 lines of code.

One surprising implication of gold rush dynamics is that the companies that are successful during one gold rush are likely to fail during the next gold rush. The archetypal post-gold rushers are the companies that became established during an earlier gold rush. These companies repeat Marshall and Sutter's mistake of seeing new-technology gold as a nuisance that will interfere with their well-laid plans for extracting maximum value from the claims they staked during the last gold rush. Examples of companies that were slow to pick up new-technology gold nuggets include IBM during the early days of PC-DOS; Lotus during the early days of Windows; and Microsoft during the early dawn of the Internet, although Microsoft recovered from its early mistakes. The most compelling example in modern computing has to be Xerox. Many of the fundamental ideas of modern desktop computing were invented at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, including the GUI interface, the mouse, and the Ethernet. But Xerox was so busy trying not to lose the copy machine war that it lost the computing war without ever really entering it.

Other post-gold rush companies are just too bloated to compete effectively in gold rush markets. The overhead necessary to sell to Early Majority and Late Majority customers isn't needed during a gold rush. In a gold rush market, you can cut your products to the bone and still do well with the innovators and early adopters who count the most in those markets.

We'll undoubtedly see this boom and bust pattern repeated during whatever technology cycle follows the Internet. Some of the companies that had the greatest successes in the early days of the Internet such as Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo will miss the next wave; only time will tell which will successfully navigate the next great transition.



Professional Software Development(c) Shorter Schedules, Higher Quality Products, More Successful Projects, [... ]reers
Professional Software Development(c) Shorter Schedules, Higher Quality Products, More Successful Projects, [... ]reers
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 164

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