Adopting new Technologies

It seems like there is a cool new product invented every 15 minutes. And, at least a few of them seem so good it is hard to resist buying them right then. How do we know when switch to something new? How do we know tomorrow will not bring the next greatest thing that will make our new cool gadget obselete. We have the same problem with software as everyone has with new gadgets, when is the right time to move to the new technology.

Last year I purchased a Blue-Ray DVD player. I was so excited, the picture and sound were amazing. I bought a couple of Blue-Ray DVD's to go with the player. I got it home, plugged in all the wires and tried it out. I was really impressed it looked just as good as it did in the store. My wife was a little less impressed especially with the price. I even got my little girl hooked on my new Blue-Ray DVD's (Spiderman especially), she loved them. A few days later we were going on a trip and she wanted the Spiderman DVD we had to explain it only worked in the player in our family room. The next day she wanted to watch the Spiderman DVD in the basement, again we had to tell our crying child (she's 2 1/2) that it only worked on the one TV. I also realized it has about a 3 minute warm up before it will play a DVD. This doesn't seem bad unless you have a child with about a 1 minute attention span. Long story short, while I love the great quality this new gadget has brought my family the headaches are really not worth the expense.

Software is much the same. I was having a conversation with a developer last night about the problems with JavaScript web applications as opposed to an Adobe Flex application. There are always new languages, platforms, and tools. How do we decide to move to some new technology? When we move to a new technology there is a long process of fact finding. Can it do what we want, is it fast enough, what is the learning curve, what is the adoption rate. Take Microsoft’s new technology Silverlight it has some great advantages. It is fast running and it has a great interface for developers. It has a great learning curve since the code can be written in C#. There are some disadvantages especially in the adoption rate. This new technology isn’t something I would recommend we use on a brochure website. Flash would work just as well and every user that went to the site would see the animation without having a download. If I were creating a web application that had some serious client side UI, I would lean toward Silverlight. Adobe has a competitor to Silverlight with Flex. We also need to look at the size of the codebase we are working on to determine how long a conversion would take. For the most part I choose the technology for each project based on the parameters of the project. I find that if you are stuck in one technology and try to make every project fit into it there will be too many times