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Why are digital leaders (Facebook, Google, Amazon and friends) ten times better at rapidly delivering software than mainstream enterprise organisations? That's

Why are digital leaders (Facebook, Google, Amazon and friends) ten times better at rapidly delivering software than mainstream enterprise organisations? That's the first sentence, hence the premise of the article. Don't you need to provide some supporting evidence for those figures? Experience, again, suggests not. The digital leaders themselves are behemoths! Facebook has 1.19 billion active monthly users. Keeping them happy is quite a task, yet they manage to innovate alongside keeping the lights on. So how come enterprises are still so slow? Why do their technological efforts always seem to cost much more than they should? Why does the software development gap persist? Does not follow. Facebook has lots of users but they have a relatively small workforce compared to traditional big companies. Over some threshold it's probably easier to "satisfy" lots of users via network effects than it is to please a small but critical community, anyway, but that's just conjecture. The article is a continued series of unsupported assertions and "facts".

benjaminwootton 10y ago
Anyone who has been around enterprise IT would probably say that this is at least the right order of magnitude. A Spotify, Netflix, Google, Facebook can fly compared to a traditional enterprise
- walshemj 10y ago
  I think it depends on the enterprise I recall when I worked at a big telco in the UK a stat that we delivered 80% better than the average - I though "Huh company propaganda" - but when I worked for other Large companies I was shocked a how crap they where. Then again my division was the direct heir to Tommy Flowers group and at the time had more engineers than Google had employees.
- zigzigzag 10y ago
  Have you worked at any of these companies recently? If not, how do you know they fly? My observation from when I worked at Google was that the organisation was rapidly slowing down over time, and projects that were essentially pointless or duplicative were multiplying. Very simple tasks were starting to become extremely hard work. Much like a traditional large enterprise, in fact.
zzzcpan 10y ago
Yeah, I wasn't even able to finish the article because of so many unsupported assertions and "facts".
snarf21 10y ago
Exactly, it is largely cultural and the talent thing may be just much about the kinds of employees. At a big enterprise company people want to keep their head down, collect their bonus and justify their existence. At these cooler companies, young talent is willing to work 60+ or 80+ because they are at FB and love how cool that makes them. Look at how Microsoft stalled for a lot of years but after a change of culture (and focus!) they had a monster year and are poised for more. Their talent makeup wasn't that different during the bad or good times. Also, the argument fails when you look at all of the failed projects, spin outs and copy cat business of FB and Google and Microsoft. If they are 10x better in their very core, why all the failures? Because it is so easy to get wrong. Lots of companies have no choice but to do what their customers pay them to do or go out of business. Lots of companies don't have the cash cows of web search or Office to allow for huge mistakes.

benjaminwootton 10y ago

Anyone who has been around enterprise IT would probably say that this is at least the right order of magnitude. A Spotify, Netflix, Google, Facebook can fly compared to a traditional enterprise

walshemj 10y ago
I think it depends on the enterprise I recall when I worked at a big telco in the UK a stat that we delivered 80% better than the average - I though "Huh company propaganda" - but when I worked for other Large companies I was shocked a how crap they where. Then again my division was the direct heir to Tommy Flowers group and at the time had more engineers than Google had employees.
zigzigzag 10y ago
Have you worked at any of these companies recently? If not, how do you know they fly? My observation from when I worked at Google was that the organisation was rapidly slowing down over time, and projects that were essentially pointless or duplicative were multiplying. Very simple tasks were starting to become extremely hard work. Much like a traditional large enterprise, in fact.

zzzcpan 10y ago

Yeah, I wasn't even able to finish the article because of so many unsupported assertions and "facts".

snarf21 10y ago

Exactly, it is largely cultural and the talent thing may be just much about the kinds of employees. At a big enterprise company people want to keep their head down, collect their bonus and justify their existence. At these cooler companies, young talent is willing to work 60+ or 80+ because they are at FB and love how cool that makes them. Look at how Microsoft stalled for a lot of years but after a change of culture (and focus!) they had a monster year and are poised for more. Their talent makeup wasn't that different during the bad or good times. Also, the argument fails when you look at all of the failed projects, spin outs and copy cat business of FB and Google and Microsoft. If they are 10x better in their very core, why all the failures? Because it is so easy to get wrong. Lots of companies have no choice but to do what their customers pay them to do or go out of business. Lots of companies don't have the cash cows of web search or Office to allow for huge mistakes.