Why should a company keep current as technology grows? I have been thinking on this specific topic from many perspectives the last few days. There is a cost associated with keeping current with technology. Is there a cost for not keeping current?
Here are a few things I have observed in my career at different companies.
One company had a software firewall operating on top of a windows server. They had purchased it 10 years earlier, and it was still working fine. It was a dedicated machine simply performing firewall functions. No spare parts were retained, and the software was no longer supported by Microsoft of the firewall company. When the hard disk died (after 10 years) the machine went down and the company had no internet connectivity for 2 days until a replacement was purchased in implemented.
Another company had a hardware/software combination they had used running on a Data General computer, the manufacturer who had been out of business for five years. Support was hard to find and the company had its core business processes operating on it. It did everything they needed it to do; but the software could not be ported to another system.
How about the company that pays a premium for talent because they are using technologies that are old enough new developers are not interested in learning how to program. Cobol is a great example. College students are wanting to get involved with tools and companies that are current and transferrable should a need to change companies arise.
Developers using more mainstream tools want to stay current with releases as soon as it make sense. Usually framework extensions result in optimizations, programming made easier, or extended capabilities. Nobody wants to remain one or two releases behind.
Companies should be concerned with upgrades for many reasons. A principal reason would be security. Optimizations and enhancements or simplification often come with new releases as well. Moreover, if you upgrade on a regular basis you will find upgrading to be a much simpler process than making a major upgrade of tools with a larger gap in capabilities.
Finally, hardware has a limited lifetime. It won’t last forever, and parts become harder to find from year to year; the cycle for parts seems to be getting shorter with each release. Often new software may be integrated with capabilities released in new hardware. Not upgrading both hardware and software for too long may put you company at risk in many ways.
Add to my thoughts by leaving your comments here online, or simply drop me an email at btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben