Beware of jumping the software shark

“Hey, grades are not cool, learning is cool.” Fonzie (Happy Days)

You may not know this but in the 1980s, a growing part of what French people affectuously call “Le PAF” short for “Le Paysage Audiovisuel Francais” or “French Audiovisual Landscape” (“FAL”?) was filled with various long-running sitcoms and TV series from the US or Japan and occasionally the UK or Germany. As a boy growing up, I was fascinated with the likes of Airwolf, Knight Rider, Street Hawk, the Dukes of Hazzard or Starsky & Hutch and although our dad was keen on watching Benny Hills at dinner time, the 7 pm family rendez-vous during the weekdays was the famous TV sitcom called “Happy Days”.

It may be my fuzzy memory, but I recall this TV programs one of those things that could lift you up and having this little “Je ne sais quoi” that made it the perfect program when you needed to just relax and smile. Or simply, like most boys of my age, we would look up to Fonzie (played by the inimitable Henry Winkler), a character defined by the exaggeration of all the traits boys would have loved to display: smart, funny, brave, strong, heroic, charming and most importantly coooooooool when with a knock of his fist he could fix or switch on/off a light or the jukebox!!!

Happy Days was just that perfect family entertainment and just like Fonzie and its strength, it probably was impossible to fathom that it would become stale and disappear off the small screens….

It may be that that the French channels had only bought rights to only the first part of the series, but I don’t think I remember seeing the fated third episode of Season 5 where Fonzie on a trip to Los Angeles ends up jumping over a confined shark while water skiing in order to demonstrate his increasingly unbelievable super-hero skills (for those who are not faint of heart, you can see the whole embarrassing affair here below.

So this was with horror that after many years of idolizing Fonzie, I discovered the clip above.

As discussed in Wikipedia and referring to that episode, the phrase "jumping the shark" was coined in 1985 by Jon Hein's roommate at the University of Michigan, Sean Connolly, when they were talking about favorite television shows that had gone downhill, and the two began identifying other shows where a similar "jump the shark" moment had occurred. Hein described the term as "A defining moment when you know from now on … it's all downhill … it will never be the same."

So why am I talking about the glorious days of Happy Days you ask?

It is because it popped up in my mind as I was reading some article about some new fancy technology where hyperlatives would replace superlatives and where according to the author adopting this technology would make it that the world would never be the same again. Those technologies when implemented into your software would surely make them so good as to become unstoppable… a little bit like if using these new power, your product would be able to implement super feats like… jumping over a metaphorical shark.

Indeed, haven’t we heard of document databases, predictive analytics, intelligent agents, distributed computing object model, chatbot, blockchain(?) etc. without which your products would become useless or at least become so much less competitive that you would end up losing market share and become irrelevant.

Of course, in our fast paced industries, it may seem important to pay attention to all the trends that develop to make sure that we don’t miss the ones that would lead to a paradigm shift.

Indeed, Microsoft and Bill Gates famously misunderstood the impact that the Internet would have, leading them to invest massively in closed networking technologies and forums, before, late to the party, they tried to kill the concept of OS-agnostic browser. And fortunately they failed at doing that now that it is clear that the open Internet symbolized by its open browser had clearly led to the next industrial revolution. Again, snatching defeat from the jaw of victory a decade later, the same Microsoft wound up also misunderstanding the future impact of touch enabled user interfaces, leaving Apple to dominate the mobile computing world for a decade.

As a matter of fact, the example of Apple and the iPhone actually shows that innovation is not as simple as slapping a new innovative technology onto an existing system. Indeed LG (with its PRADA) phone was first to market with a mobile phone that could be considered as the ancestor of the modern smartphone. However, who remembers the LG PRADA apart from technology archeologists like me?

To compare these two products enables us to really capture the key difference that led to become the runaway success that we all know while the other faded into obscurity. In the latter, the large touchscreen (the technology) was the whole value proposal while in the former, the large touchscreen became transparent to the user, fading out of view to let the iOS user-interface shine.

As the old idiom say, not all that glitters is gold.

As I look back, I realized that during my career, there was a couple of times where I strongly felt that our product team was not only using new technologies for the sake of it, but instead and actually “jumping the software shark”, setting the system on a downhill course where nothing would ever be the same again….

Indeed, the engineering team, misled by astute marketers and promises of incredible feats, had decided to employ newly hyped glittery systems against any product management rationale.

Of course, this decision was taken while overlooking the impact that this decision would have on the marketability of the system and while the new technologies were supposed to deliver great new benefits, the system ended up buggier, slower, more error-prone and in general more difficult to use for our end-users.

Of course, as soon as I found about such ill-considered changes and additions, I did try and ask the team to reconsider, explaining why such changes may not be as marvellous as they were sold to us. Sometimes, fortunately, people reconsidered their original choice. Most of the times, sadly, the product would ship as-is.

People who are familiar with this kind of situation by now realize that this situation effectively led to hundreds of productive hours lost to bug reporting, debugging, work-arounding, customer dissatisfaction and loss of customer trust etc. hurting our relationships with customers but also preventing us from spending more time on customer facing and revenue generating activities.

Considering the potentially dire consequences when lost in the maelstrom of new technologies, what should a CTO/CEO do to prevent their company from jumping the software shark?

Actually, it is pretty simple and relies in effectively following the three Vs:

• VISION: A clear product vision, championed by an effective product manager or PM team, open to feedback from the customer success team.
• VET: Either for the CTO or for the Engineering Team Leader to have process in place to vet new technologies (especially within a mature product) using a variation of the 5 Whys (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys) to ensure that the technology is being employed not only because “it is cool” or “my neighbor does it” but also because it will effectively deliver value to customers.
• VERIFY: A Continuous Integration practice making it possible to continuously verify that the performance envelope of the system does not worsen significantly or at least deliver performances and a value that can be comfortably pitched against the additionally required resources.

Obviously, in a mature product with a significant deployed user base, it is even all the more important to try to increase the innovation level without significantly increasing the needed resource envelope, making it even more important to effectively deploy the three Vs.

Finally, it is still important to note that while a specific new technology may not be fit to be added in a mature product, it may well be an important springboard for quickly developing innovative product. Indeed, it is important to let engineers play around with new technologies and new concepts to sometimes stumble upon new disruptive product lines that may completely transform the enterprise as it is.

As a conclusion, while it is important to keep innovation lanes open for engineers to swim into while building new products, it is important to have a clear process in place when adding new features and technologies into a mature product in order to make sure the product delivers additional value to existing and new users.

In oomnis (https://www.oomnis.com), we build and curate software in order to provide a solution using the most adapted technology for the job. If your company needs an overhaul of its audiovisual solutions, custom development solutions, a meeting room management systems (https://www.oomnis.com/roooms/) or IoT networking solutions, give us a shout!