Technology vs. Business

This is where I'll talk about a technology. I'm a technical person, a software engineer. I have worked in many roles. Technology should be as easy to deal with as a walk in a park. Not quite so. Starting a business is not about technology, it's about making technology work, about solving real problems. Technology ceases to be a purpose in itself; it's merely a tool to deliver solutions to real life problems.

It's an entirely different mindset. As a software engineer, you grow to love technology, you get attached to some technologies, you hate others. You might even get caught up in a flame on newsgroups trying to prove your technology is better than other people's.

There's that saying ... when all you have is a hammer, all your problems look like nails.

And this is true. Software engineers become obsessed with technology and try to choose the technology first and then look at the problem they're trying to solve. Many times companies do the same, just because their people are all trained in a particular technology.

But technology for technology's sake is not a viable proposition. Unfortunately some people found out the hard way during the dotcom crash in the late 90s. When something is cool and sexy, you can easily lose your head and all your money.

In my approach I've decided to take a pragmatic approach. I will choose the technology that helps me solve the particular business need. It hasn't been easy, and, in fact, there's still a battle going on between the software engineer who always favors some technologies and the businessman who doesn't care about technology, all he wants is problem fixed.

In my product, a key requirement was that the application should support as many Windows OS flavors. For the time being I'm not going to support Mac, Linux or other OSes. However, this decision can be revisited later on if it becomes viable to support other OSes.

Another requirement was that the application should require minimal dependencies to be installed. For the time being this disqualifies .NET, although this is the direction Microsoft is paddling at the moment. I like .NET, however I think it needs some time to mature.

There were other choices: VB, Java, Delphi, etc. but since the businessman didn't care that much, the software engineer chose in the end the technologies he was more familiar with: C++, COM, ATL. See, it's never easy to be totally business focused when you come from a software engineering background. However, since the learning curve for other technologies might significantly affect the time to market, the businessman conceded.

But this is a major problem for many companies, the technology vs. the business. The business is always driving the requirements while the technology tries to solve the problems while keeping the pace and avoiding deprecation.