Comment standards, modularity, corporate culture (Score 1) 614
It's the CEO's job to forsee and avoid strategic dead-ends. Many aren't so good at it.
As a Linux fanboy since 1994, UNIX and OS/2 guy before that, I was aghast when corpoations picked Win 3.1 on what, DOS 5.0? as a standard. "But X Windows is so much more modular, flexible, and portable! You can even run it on DOS machines!" I was right of course, and Win 3.1 standardizers spent much more hidden money on virus problems than it ever would have cost to get things going with Linux in the 1990's.
The best start companies can make to solve their jam-up is to modularize their old systems using the old tech. Then they can slowly replace bits and pieces with more modern, open, standards-based solutions -- Python? it has a small footprint -- at their leisure. When everything possible has been moved to portable tech, find a way -- virtual machines, emulation -- to move the last pieces. Now at last you can run on a modern OS -- any modern OS, you're not stuck any more.
I see companies making the same mistakes today by standardizing on
The reason companies get jammed up this way is their corporate culture. Short-term thinking has been identified in many posts here. Another factor is, simply, inflexible fear-based, cog-in-the-machine, just-tell-me-what-to-do employees. The bigger and more stable the institution, the more attractive it is to such people. Great, as long as the world doesn't change, which it seems to be doing faster and faster these days.
If the corporation itself was more modular and standards-based, it too would be more flexible, able to outsource, delegate, disentangle various business processes. Do we really need all the departments that our inflexible old software supports? Order fulfillment, customer service, marketing, manufacturing, design, bookkeeping -- all can be outsourced. We may choose to keep these functions in house, but let's define the interfaces between departments and their supporting IT, so that it's modular and we have flexibility in the future.