Thursday, January 21, 2016

ideas: The Stack Fallacy (!)

Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy | TechCrunch

"Stack fallacy has caused many companies to attempt to capture new markets and fail spectacularly. When you see a database company thinking apps are easy, or a VM company thinking big data is easy  — they are suffering from stack fallacy.
Stack fallacy is the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layer above yours."

"The bottleneck for success often is not knowledge of the tools, but lack of understanding of the customer needs. Database engineers know almost nothing about what supply chain software customers want or need. They can hire for that, but it is not a core competency.

In a surprising way, it is far easier to innovate down the stack than up the stack.
The reason for this is that you are yourself a natural customer of the lower layers."

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