Platform Mobility is the "next big thing"

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Designing for change

I often get into discussions with architects that turn a little bit into "platform/language" shootouts. Moreover this can leak into business meetings where folks start to sound like elementary school students bragging about how "my dad can beat up your dad". The reality is, however, that the lifetime of a platform's relevance is roughly around 5 years....business (especially digital business) evolves and changes so rapidly that the cost to switch becomes an overarching theme when thinking about the "big picture".

How I think about software platforms I'll call it the "mike system"

  1. how hard is it to get onboard?
  2. How hard will it be to get offboard in 3-5 years?
  3. Everything else (functionality, scalability, performance...)

Why is onboarding ease important? Well, because if it takes 3 years to set up, you'll be on to your next platform before you can realize value from this one.

Why is offboarding ease important? Same thing...if it takes 3 years to migrate off your current platform you'll not be able to reduce the negative impact of your legacy platform.

What about everything else? Well, truth be told, for any solution in the "general purpose" catgory of problems...like ecommerce, contennt management, generic integrations, there are already a large and every growing number of tools/platforms that can get the job done quite well.

So, unless you're building an avionics system (in which case you should probably build it yourself) or some sort of life critical system (same thing), go find a commodity product that meets your cost/benefit goals and stop thinking it's "strategic".

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