The young (ISV) doesn’t always supplant the old

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What keeps established software companies in their position in the face of competition from startups?

 

I have an interesting perspective. Before joining Microsoft, I was the CTO, alternately, of a rag-tag startup and an established, market-leading enterprise ISV.

 

There are a lot of reasons people stick with an ISV, institutional experience, branding, migration costs, risk aversion, user training and upheaval are just a few examples. Yet in the face of this, startups should have some important edges.

 

Startups should be able to more easily take advantage of new technologies, tools and development techniques. It is inherently easier to move to SOA, implement design patterns or have an all managed .NET solution if you are starting from scratch then if you have millions of lines of code and tens of thousands of users to migrate. This advantage alone has spawned hundreds of ISVs who hoped to gain market share by through technology. The problem is that the advantages of the new technologies, tools and techniques are often dwarfed by the pressure to close the functional gap with the "old lion" leader.

 

As anyone who ever been involved with sales for a startup will tell you, every sales prospect comes up with a different piece of must-have functionality that ties them to their current vendor. For the young Lion, quickly eliminating years or even decades worth of functional gaps with the established leader can be expensive and daunting and often leads to shortcuts on quality, scalability or usability.

 

The old Lion’s may finally have something to really worry about. WinFX architects and developers will be able to create highly scalable and flexible solutions so fast that it could undermine the advantages that leaders rely upon. Startups who design, develop, test and manage their projects with Visual Studio 2005 with Team System and who build solutions with Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, SQL Server 2005 and InfoCard will find productivity to be the strategic advantage they hope for.

 

There is a tipping point to watch for here. At some point, the young Lion’s advantages from higher productivity and more flexible architectures could swamp the lead the old Lion enjoys. The leader, weighed down with legacy systems, finds it unable to keep up with the startup and is left behind.

 

So it does not matter is you are with an old Lion enterprise ISV protecting your position or the young Lion startup, start your research at the WinFX Developer Center today.