Re: [tlug] STM (was: Re: work times & accommodation @tokyo)

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2008-07-30 04:06 +0900 (Wed), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>  > Or that five years from now you can start your company on its first
>  > steps in a new language or set of tools and it will rapidly catch
>  > up with companies of similar size that have had people
>  > experimenting with the language or set of tools for five years?
> 
> I would say that you probably can catch up to the pioneers in half the
> time, yes.  If nothing else, by acquiring some of them.  And you can
> probably achieve the bulk of the productivity gains in half the time,
> even after the tools have become established.  This is known to work
> in other fields, I see no reason why it wouldn't be true of software.

I'd like to know where it does work. In the IBM example, they were doing
exactly what I said they should do: start early. They chose to do this
though fairly massive spending on research, and I think that, if you're
a bit clever about it, you can spend less on that if your main aim is
producing software, but either way, it was a "start early" thing.

As for counterexamples; I think that they abound. Fujitsu is not exactly
known as a maker of disk drives these days. TI and HP? Not exactly
prime examples of successful companies now.

Intel? Oops, they did the sort of thing I reccomend: started in early
with a new technology (microprocessors) and when their memory business
died, they survived.

cjs
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Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974   
Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com