Years ago I was partners in a consulting firm with one of the first mainframe salesman at IBM. My partner covered Wall Street for IBM. He told me that every brokerage house that did not choose IBM went out of business because they could not scale their business as fast as competitors and they could not add new features as quickly. This story stuck in my mind and prompted me to be careful in choosing technology for clients and operating companies where I was senior management.
Roll forward to 2011 and the impending demise of MySpace, one of the early market leaders in social networking. An article in SAI today proposes that a significant contributor to MySpace's problems is their use of Microsoft technology. The reliance on Microsoft made it difficult to attract talented programmers who prefer other technologies and to add new features. Sounds very similar to my Wall Street example.
At this point you should be asking yourself why are you still using the outdated, proprietary technology of Microsoft. There are viable alternatives such as cloud computing and open source software. It may not be clear where the future of computing is going but it surely will not be lead by Microsoft.
