Remember the Nokia phones? They were indestructible and the best thing next to a Blackberry before smartphones.
They were doomed. Not because their product was inferior. When the iPhone came out, everyone’s product was inferior. It was because they were slow. It would take a developer 24-48 hours to compile and get changes ready for testing. It could take a week or two (!!) to build the complete software.
Anyone who is a developer is cringing right now at that thought.
Interestingly, at some companies, adding AI to their development process isn’t speeding up the pace of delivering software. This isn’t AI’s fault, of course, it is the result of the bottleneck being somewhere else that hasn’t or can’t be sped up by AI. If you have read “The Goal” (Eliyahu M. Goldratt), you know that any improvement outside of the actual bottleneck is probably wasted effort.
This last concept is an important one. Making developers more efficient is not the goal. Delivering more high-quality faster is the goal.
https://howardyu.substack.com/p/what-nokia-teaches-any-company-bolting
Leave a Reply