I have been working on this blog post for around six months. I keep writing and shelving it. Today I read a blog post from the DexExpress CTO that got me back to wanting to publish this post.
Early Adopters?
To put what Julian said in different terms; Do you want all the Early Adopters for your product? There are pro and con arguments to having the early adopters when it comes to technology.
While they tend to be some of the most passionate people out there, and they are usually eager to play with a technology but have little to no loyalty to that technology. By the time you have stabilized your product cycle they will be long gone on to the next technology buzzword to play with it.
They also tend to have the most harsh reviews of the early technology. They will bash it as not complete, or not like product x, etc. But by the time you have addressed their issues they will never come back to update those huge blog rants they did against you in the early days. Their social media contracts tend to be very one sided – whatever is in it for them today. After all anyone on the Internet can post a blog slamming a product or technology as inferior. You don’t need credentials or facts to back you up. Just post it – people will believe it. And if the company actually listens to you and implements your suggestions you can always shrug them off as not being “agile” enough for you (IE, they didn’t give you that build the same day you asked for it).
Buzz word and gone
Microsoft is great at playing into this early adopter hype. They print magazines with all their buzz word laden technologies sometimes years before you or I will be able to put it into production. And by the time you do get around to wanting to use it in production they have often already abandoned it for another, newer, faster, more buzz word laden system.
Look at Windows Workflow (WF). Anyone who early adopted it is probably kicking themselves now. Microsoft has basically punched reset on the entire design. I really looked at implementing VistaDB serializers for WF.
They can’t remove it from the framework!
And to all the people who use the argument that they can’t remove it from the framework - that is just silly. LINQ 2 SQL (L2S) is a good example of this. Microsoft printed tons of material about it, but you weren’t supposed to take it seriously. It was just until the more serious Entity Framework came along, didn’t you know?
Well, from the number of articles, books, etc I don’t think anyone understood that argument. So if you did buy into that technology what about .Net 4? Well, Microsoft has said that L2S will exist in some capacity, but what does that mean? To me it means it means you had better be embracing .Net 3.5 SP1 for a very long time.
If your favorite buzzword technology was implemented in a SP how stable is that to actually deploy? I know lots of shops that still refuse to deploy .NET 3.5 SP1 because of the problems they had with the “Service Pack” changing how things worked for their applications.
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