Tag: Business (4)

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

And no, I am not hypocritically tilting at my own “disturbing new trend”. In 1777 David Hume wrote, “The humour of blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature”. A century before him, Thomas Hobbes identified its source: “Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead”. People also blame the present out of historical ignorance and statistical illiteracy, and because they mistake changes in themselves—the responsibilities of adulthood, the vigilance of parenthood, the diminishments of ageing—with changes in the world.

If the business process you are supporting is part of your competitive advantage you should build custom software, if not you should buy a package and adjust your business process to fit the way the package works.

I think really great products come from melding two points of view — the technology point of view and the customer point of view. You need both. You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.