Technology, really ?

In the IT sphere, the most commercially used word is probably "technology".

To be honest, i consider this one of the biggest lies ever. It is for sure good for a company's ego to say it is working with "cutting edge technologies". It is probably also good for the sales, as "new" written in yellow on a soap package in the supermarket. Some software houses even include the term in their name. Unfortunately though, this is (IMHO) a wrong message. This focus on "technology" has between other consequences a catastrophic tendency to implement unduly complex solutions (this is even done sometimes to lock a client with a provider, which we call "job protection").

Indeed, many companies develop new technologies. One of the most famous is Google with its revolutionary search engine (and many other tools). Many start-up are effectively creating new technologies, some of them pretty unknown although they have great ideas (as the risk management platform of ClearPriority).

But let's be honest: most of consultancy firms, software houses and generally speaking IT services companies are mere followers of the true inovators. My experience as a software developer and IT consultant shows that a software house's job is far from developing rocket science.

A software house should have a good knowledge of the technologies it will use in a development. Which does not imply that those technologies should be cutting edge. To the countrary, many companies simply do not want to bear the risk of trying new technologies. In general, they implement solutions with technologies that are 2-10 years old (the time necessary for a technology to become stable and well known).

To be complete, i should add that the latest technologies are important to us: we should follow them, try, evaluate, test them to use in the mid-term future. But i really wouldn't recommend to sell them directly to a client.

As manager of one of those software houses, i am not a great fan of commercial false promises. I prefer to be clearly transparent about what we do and what are the limits of our competence. I'm maybe naive, but this is another topic. And i consider that basically, our mission is to answer a business need using the minimal technology to do so. It is software as service, not software as technology.