on Oct 8th, 2007The saga of the legacy lovers
Gone are the days of the digital divide, there is a new kind of divide amongst many computer professionals now. Its the generation gap. Its hard to comprehend this statement, but anybody, whose is exposed to at least 5 years of industry dynamics, will know exactly what I am talking about. Call it Moore’s law affecting software or just plain old generation gap, there is a clear demarcation between people who appreciate new concepts and those who prefer things the 90s way.
There are a set of people that like the innovation happening on the web front and are adopting 2.0 technologies like there is no tomorrow. Everything from office automation to project management is now managed online on productivity service providers. Concepts like wiki, blogs, forums etc are fast appearing as mainstream applications in organizations. Surely as technology evolves and takes new shape, we will see a dramatic shift in adoption of these new tools .
In contrast , there are the other people who have been around for a long time and have seen a lot of productivity applications. To these people, technology is nothing more than a fast changing fad and prefer to stick to their old time favorites. Take people who have seen the main frame era, such folk just don’t appreciate concepts like distributed computing, virtual servers etc. Quotes like ” our mainframes never needed mirroring”, are common. People who still live reminiscing innovation of their times like spreadsheets and ERP’s.
It may be hard to believe but these form the majority of the so called power users of organizations and these legacy softwares( pun intended) , are maintained and supported just for their usage. Its distrubing to know that enterprise software lags open source software by at least 3 years , in terms of innovation. This lag can clearly be accounted to the legacy lovers who insist on using their accustomed softwares. Where does product development go in such a case. Office 2007 is seeing very slow adoption due to a change in the usability. Will this set of users be responsible for the sluggishness of product development? who will convince these users to adopt newer software? more importantly how? What will these users demand 20 years from now?
Its a strange question, but yes its an emerging market.
If a software/trend/product does not offer enough to be able to attract people away from their original choices, then it probably doesnt deserve these old users in the first place. The people who arent shifting over are clearly highly satisfied with their old skool products and that says as much about the new product as does about the people who we think are not shifting over.
Its far from easy to shift a really large business organisation that has been living off one suite of products (most of their content lives in these suites), to a newer counterpart. Lots of work involved and if it isnt unavoidable, most people wouldnt prefer the shift.
I would think that newer technologies will more easily be adopted by startups (versus established companies) and it seems like quite a reasonable trend… And as we have a steep rise in the number of startups, i think all generations are going to be happy for a while..