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I could see that working for a set of moonshot efforts at startups who primarily only have to keep investors interested, or some subset of research projects at
by frank_nitti 4y ago
I could see that working for a set of moonshot efforts at startups who primarily only have to keep investors interested, or some subset of research projects at FAAMG companies with money to burn.
But how could that work with big companies making contracts with other big companies as their customers? Doesn’t seem like they could afford to just “let many fail” as they could lose the customer’s trust.
- ratww 4y agoBig corps doing big projects are already doing risky stuff. Those big projects often fail to deliver the expected result within the expected time frame and budget. Devils advocate: Having multiple efforts in parallel with the crazy overhead would probably give at least one of them a fighting chance of succeeding. Who cares about the ones that failed when the whole big project worked for once.
- frank_nitti 4y agoI see, we are referring to an internal mechanism for the vendor to try multiple routes to meet the customer ask - this makes more sense, but I could see a lot of traditional enterprise customers being hesitant to buy in if they were made aware (if you could do it with only the partial resources that delivered the “successful” solution, why am I paying for the others?)
- phkahler 4y agoMost software is essentially rented. It already written and has zero marginal cost. The vendor is using the rent to develop the next version. An exception would be specific contracted work, or bug fixes under a maintenance contract. How that next version gets developed is really up to the company. Or we can just continue getting great stuff like windows 10 and 11.