What You See is Not Always What You Get

A number of years ago, I saw a great product advertisement in a magazine.  The advertisement was essentially a picture of a two rabbit ear antenna, embedded in a plastic cone to make it look like a satellite dish.  Part of the text proudly read “this is not a new technology, this is a marketing breakthrough!”

As the VP of Engineering at RightAnswers, I deal with a lot technical aspects of the job.  I find that part of my job is to understand how products in our industry actually work, under the hood – to check if there is anything fundamentally new and interesting.  I read the patents, I read white papers about the products – and more often than not, I find that very little is unique or new to this “amazing” technology being advertised.  Patents seem to be granted on work that was done 10 or 15 years ago – mostly because it looks good to the market – not with the idea that the patent would stand up in court.

Next time you evaluate a product that claims to have “never-seen-before” technology, take a closer look.  Many of these new technologies have been around for quite some time, just under different terms.

My advice to people who don’t have the time or inclination to understand the technology behind the terms that they read is the following:  find out if it works for your purposes.  Test the software or product.  Even if the company cannot offer a trial of their product, they still have demo systems available.  This is your best bet to make sure the product is right for you, or your company.

It would be nice if all product marketing materials clearly stated what their “marketing breakthroughs” are.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.  It is often best to go with a product in which the technology is clearly understood, and one that is offered by a reliable company.  My policy in the current market is that when something sounds like snake oil, I assume it is until proven otherwise.

Keeping the Process of Choosing a Solution Simple

Simplicity is underrated.  The best ideas are great precisely because they are simple.  I think the key is to be able to determine the level of complexity that is justified by any given problem. One does not need to build the roman aqueducts to water the garden.  I think this is something that anyone starting or implementing a big software project needs to keep repeating to themselves. It is up to the architect to execute a plan that is streamlined, efficient and sustainable.

There are software vendors out there offering solutions that are too complex for the problem at hand.  They attempt to solve all possible related problems and give themselves all possible functionality and flexibility. Then clients buy into someone selling them a toolkit that says it can do everything, which invariably means that it will do nothing particularly well. Clients devote large teams to the evaluation and implementation of such tools, customizing them to their own purposes. What ends up happening is that over half the allocated budget on such a project often goes to this time consuming planning. People think they are saving something by this approach, saying, “Well this way we only have to deal with one vendor and develop internal expertise in one thing.”  What one needs to keep in mind is that the complexity increases non-linearly with the number of things a tool is expected to do.  

In my experience, the better approach is incremental with well understood and easy to control milestones and functionalities.  Rank your problems, and then solve them individually, and in order.  Buy the best tool for each objective you wish to achieve. Reevaluation after each implementation gives you the chance to solve overlooked and hidden problems and give a superior end result.  For each problem make sure you are not spending more in time and money than the problem is worth.