Part of my job is to prevent usage of technologies. This sounds so uncool, I know. Do you want to increase the chance of success of your organization? You must prevent technologies. There are lots of technologies out there. Most of the technologies are not relevant to your situation. It is cool to build a spaceship, but do you need one?

Problem

Growth of a startup S that makes technology/product X is more important than whether or not there is a match between X and your use case. S generally doesn’t care whether your startup will succeed or fail because you used X. There is no immediate economical incentive for S to be honest. In short, S f*cks you over for money.

 

As a consequence, a distorted picture of reality is presented to you:

• The world is full of marketing bullshit. It is similar to psychological warfare, as noted in a post about 10gen marketing strategies.
• Chunks of this bullshit are masked as engineering blogs.
• Half truths are presented, such as company Blah uses X. They might be using it but for what? Is that in the core of their business or in some side project?
• Vocal advocates of X all over (gaining directly or indirectly from you using X)

Solution

• Remember that your aim is to succeed as a company and the aim of S is also to succeed. The correlation does not have to exist, and when it exists it does not have to be positive.
• Start with problems that you have and find the tools for solving them, not the other way around.
• Consider peoples’ motives when they write about tool X. Will they benefit from widespread adoption of X (consultants, employees of the make of X, people affected by investors of the company behind X)? Will they look bad if they negatively review X, even for specific use case?
• Looking at a tool, assume it’s the wrong one for your use case and then prove this statement wrong.
• All people must at least be aware of cost-benefit analysis. In many cases it’s actually very simple. Zero to minuscule benefit and high adoption/migration cost.
• Take top 10 latest-shiny-cool technologies. If you are a small startup, chances are that you need zero to two of them. (Not counting the Cloud as new).
• Using latest-shiny-cool technology to attract employees is not the right thing to do. You will probably attract employees that will always want to switch to the latest technology. Maybe they will leave for another company that starts using the next latest-shiny-cool and you don’t.

See also: Prove your tool is the right choice

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Have a nice weekend!