Last week, one of our lecturers provided his students with an insight about making technology investment decisions in a corporate environment.
When it comes to chosing a technology to meet a specific need, look at the actual technology’s domestic market share evolution.
Our lecturer, a former Information Systems Architect for a French State Health Agency and a major media advertising company, told us that he had to chose a network protocol a long time ago during one of his assignments. IBM’s sales people were telling him that Token Ring was both the present and future of networking. Not only was Ethernet slightly cheaper to deploy and maintain, our lecturer also noticed reading the newspapers that IBM and National Semi-Conductors were heavily co-investing in building strong Ethernet research and manufacturing capabilities in the US. He therefore chose to invest in Ethernet rather than Token Ring, which was a standard at that time. Good move…
Obvious conclusion: take some time to assess available information before making decisions. And make some use of your common-sense.
So, in hindsight he chose correctly, but at the moment, wasn’t it a bit risky to choose an emergent technology?
…I don’t see that many companies adopting 802.11n right now. Or Wimax…
Comment by Kari — September 18, 2006 @ 8:09 am