What causes a business to abandon hardware, software or equipment it once relied on? Enumerating the common causes helps you recognize when it’s time to move on.
At one time, your company ran Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect on Novell servers, wrote its custom applications in Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic, and used Nortel or Cascade Communications to connect to the budding Internet, which you still informally describe as the information superhighway.
Don’t snort in mockery. Your business depended on those tools and technologies because they workedUsers knew the features of the product, IT support explained its configuration failures, The budget was predictable, and those vendors were reliable, safe choices,
But life goes on. Regardless of company and user loyalty, at some point, someone chose to replace that software, hardware or infrastructure with something else. What caused businesses to stop using them?
This is not some idle #GetOffMyLawn musing. Change management is a regular concern for CIOs, IT managers, and CFOs who are proud of them. The best way to determine this is, “Is it time to leave this known supplier?” The point to consider is why enterprise organizations leave behind the established brands of their past.
Companies typically hold on to existing hardware, software, computing environments, programming languages, databases, or whatever, as long as they can, as they call it, a turbo encapsulator. It is supported by file formats, established workflows, supplier contracts, and other elements that contribute to corporate inertia and technical debt.
Ultimately, a “last straw” balances out, and the organization commits to a change. “He does it!” They say. “It’s time to switch.”
Here’s how I classify those last straws, which can work alone or as part of a hay bale.
There are two types of fools. One says, “It’s old, and therefore good.” And one says, “It’s new, and therefore better.”
Dean Inge
efficiencyIt no longer does what you need, Or it doesn’t do it correctly,
The ideal scenario is the path of innovation: better products replace obsolete products.
In that case, the once unique capability of the Turbo Encapsulator becomes common. Now, another supplier has useful, new, and attractive features. Those capabilities may be related to product operations rather than product function, such as vastly improved performance, reliable security, better automation, or other “how it works” stuff.
When organizations look for new functionality, they need to be careful, avoiding buzz word snipe hunt (surely you don’t need an example of anything AI-infused?). Just because functionality is new doesn’t mean it’s relevant and valuable.
quality“Good enough” is no longer good enough,
When the user experience deteriorates, it’s time to look for alternatives.
Predictable example: New versions are bad. Connectivity failed. Credibility falters. Technical support is slow, inefficient, or difficult to reach. You can’t get a knowledgeable person to answer your questions.
Less obvious quality failures: A new version is very different. New features make the user experience inefficient, complex, or cluttered. For example, the new Turbo Encapsulator Pro changes its dashboard or API, so experienced users will have to re-learn how to interact with them. The seller repeats this error with the next version as well. Hosting companies turn “where to modify DNS records” into a search query. Or the vendor reduces the Turbo Encapsulator features to cater to non-tech-savvy users, leaving the system untested for experts.
integration issuesThe leg bone no longer connects to the thigh bone,
Many businesses can and do hold on to older computing technologies because those internal systems don’t need to talk to anything outside the company. For example, the San Francisco Muni Metro Light Railway, launched in 1980, boots its automatic train control system from floppy disks. And companies stick with older versions of operating systems as long as they get printer drivers. That’s fine – until it doesn’t.
Ultimately, business and technical standards move forward. For example, a business may be forced to migrate to a new system when the only way to connect to a data provider is through an API that Turbo Encapsulator does not support. Changes to the application began when customers demanded Word files, even though the company was internally happy with WordPerfect.
Environmental changes encourage further migration. The decision to change one element leads people to reconsider the overall architecture. When companies adopted Windows, they often changed application vendors (from Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Excel). When enterprise organizations moved to cloud environments, they considered alternative suppliers who had grown up with the Internet, rather than waiting for an established provider to stick with them.
Loss of trust in providerWhen trust is lost, everything is lost,
It is common for customers to abandon ship when a provider is in financial or other trouble. Changes in management, changes in technical leadership, and product cancellations are tip-offs. So the ship dates are missed.
Mergers and acquisitions trouble businesses. Look at the uncertainty that arose when Broadcom acquired VMware, as well as the fear of layoffs and eliminating product lines. [CJ1]
The lack of confidence may not be directly related to the supplier’s financial future. The company may change AI data collection policies or data sharing practices (as Sonos did), drop its support for open source (as Redis did), change the structure of enterprise licensing, or publicly engage in corporate drama. It can also be personal, such as when a trusted technical contact moves to a competitor.
priceCosts increase significantly without adding value,
Money is the obvious reason for this. It’s easy to link cost issues to an organization’s bottom line. If a product is not worth the investment, replacement is justified. You may face other problems, but what if it costs too much? Game over.
Cost concerns drove the adoption of open source by enterprises. Tech experts have praised open-source benefits in features and support for years. Nevertheless, the corporate transition to Linux occurred only when financial decision makers realized the significant savings they could achieve.
Need an example? I know a team that replaced project management systems when the installed application—for which the staff had created dozens of integrations and other customizations—had doubled its license fees compared to a perfectly adequate competitor. Nobody needed “new and improved” features. Variations: Unity’s price increase was so drastic that it had to be rolled back. Photo-sharing site Flickr’s subscription model changed so much that, for a time, it couldn’t even attract free subscribers.
Peopleware. Decision makers make political or emotional choices.
Sometimes, the final straw has nothing to do with the product, which still works great. Personal politics and corporate biases often outweigh other factors.
These examples may sound familiar to experienced IT personnel:
· A new CEO prefers a different product and insists on changing the company.
· A new IT manager sees no value in a turbo encapsulator, emphasizes different areas, or is convinced it can be made better and cheaper internally. An executive reads an article about “Why Everyone Should Do This…” and – in what others might charitably call eccentricity – insists the company make a significant change.
· The new leadership wants to prove its worth by undoing what the previous team accomplished or built.
Those peopleware issues don’t just emanate from the C-suite. For example, attrition occurs after people who initially adopted Turbo Encapsulator leave the company. As team membership changes, different priorities may prevail, justified or otherwise. Given the opportunity, some teams grudgingly choose to move away from established but despised tools.
This is the last straw. not the only one.
Sometimes, it is hard to identify which element is the last straw because everything is interconnected. Your company management loses trust in the vendor due to a security breach. An established provider increases its subscription pricing at the same point where users complain about bugs in the new version. The organization likes everything about the computing environment, but the ecosystem does not support a critical requirement, such as an application vendor dropping support for a preferred operating system. But I think they all fall into one of these categories.
In most cases, turbo encapsulator providers – vendors, open-source developers, and product designers – sincerely want to retain customers. Sometimes, they stumble: A competitor makes a truly innovative advance or is quick to follow through on a catchy buzzword. In other circumstances, they make avoidable mistakes, such as deploying confusing user interfaces or choosing greed over customer happiness.
Esther Schindler began writing about the intersection of technology and business before your company ran Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect on Novell servers.,