Curves Ahead

When you're driving at speed & you see a sign that says something like "Curves Ahead", it's a good time to slow down.

When you're on the bleeding edge of technology & you're ahead of the curve, the trick is to maintain speed, hang on tight, & ride it out.

In a way, the same thing is generally at stake - your future. Drive too fast & you won't have one. Make a wrong technology choice & you won't have one. The difference is that very few people drive in a competitive market.

Getting ahead of the adoption curve is very risky, & it doesn't always pay off. There are often choices that get made way back in the journey that don't let you change the technology route. If you're developing for the iPhone/iPad platform, the question is not if you'll support the recent iOS release, but how soon you can - how fast you'll take the curve - because the customer base is ahead of you.

But there are some choices that can wait - like supporting new standards before they're implemented. It's great to have a tinker with Java8, but try to incorporate it into your IDE, let alone hoping it will work reliably in beta. What about HTML5 & CSS3. Everyone seems to want to develop ahead of the curve, but in this case the customer base isn't really there yet because browsers aren't fully compliant & users are notoriously bad at upgrading their browser anyway.

Being in a beta program is a great way to look around the curve & influence the landscape ahead, but you don't want to drive around a blind corner to discover that the road hasn't been built yet. I remember Bullant Technology, & how it was going to revolutionise the web with high-speed transactions. Whole companies drove off that cliff.

Professional drivers use their experience & develop techniques to stay on track & stay alive. Professional technologists rely more on luck & gut instinct to live by the choices they make. If they fail, they move on to another race. Can we measure the success of a technology driver? Can we see how the championship points table stands?
At least that sounds easier than looking at the manufacturers' points table - they tinker with the technology vehicle so often it's hard to tell what's being driven at the front of the race.