Rapid development promotes adaptation
Very interesting argument fromAdam Bosworth:
Well this is where the comment about evolution in action comes in. Things that breed rapidly more quickly adopt through natural selection to a changing environment. Services can typically deploy changes every month or even more rapidly because they only have one single configuration on a set of machines whose OS, storage and networking they totally control and which they manage in their data centers. These days Microsoft gives birth to new products at a pace that makes an elephant seem quick, about every 60 months, that means in the time that a service can make 60 adaptions to its customer's needs, Microsoft makes one. It used to be that they shipped every 12 months. Then 18. Then 24. And so on. The creep is driven by the ever increasiongly complexity of features, hardware, os variations, and backward compatibility of the API's so ably designed to lock developers in. They locked the developers in all right. The Microsoft ones. This alone to me has been a compelling argument that when a product can be delivered as a service, it should be.
A similar argument is made in TQM circles that rapid production surfaces problems earlier and more comprehensively so that they are eliminated more quickly.
Look at Southwest Airlines.
During their 30-year dominance period under CEO Kelleher they had the fastest turnaround times of their jets AND the best safety record.
Speed, in itself, is a good for a business.
