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Changing the Company
I’ve written a bit about mishandled change attempts — everyone loves a little schadenfreude, and failure is easier to spot than success. This does not mean I think it’s wrong to change: you can’t keep selling buggy whips or spellcheckers when the market for them disappears. Let’s set aside the strategic question of recognizing that…
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Multi-tenancy in platforms
If you’ve built a monolithic enterprise product, it is not sensible to convert it to multi-tenancy. You can sell a managed service provider (MSP), but you’re not going to get to software as a service (SaaS). Often no one wants to discuss reasoning at all, because the need to convert your business to a different…
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Why is open source content rare?
Open source community incentives are biased to prefer developers over content creators. Open source communities are particularly prone to this failure mode. After all, the developers in the community are all doing their work for valid reasons, so why wouldn’t content creators join them? Hot take: the incentives are different. Open source development is a resume-building value…
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Supporting Ancient Software
With another round of fixes to Windows XP, the time is ripe for bloviating about supporting ancient stuff. Every software vendor has to decide what to do about supporting what they used to ship, as well as the broader ecosystem around them. Operating systems, databases, service providers. Maximize use of your new features, minimize maintenance…
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Land and Expand Packaging Decisions
Subsets of packaged content are needed in different system classes. If you’re pursuing a land-and-expand model, then you need to have a way to expand. One way is to ship a static monolith with features turned off. Another is to ship dynamic add-ons to your base product. Teams make these dynamic vs static decisions early.…
