Over a decade ago, Dan McKinley published a blog post titled “Choose Boring Technology” which advocates that software developers and engineers design systems using “boring” technology.
One of the most worthwhile exercises I recommend here is to consider how you would solve your immediate problem without adding anything new. First, posing this question should detect the situation where the “problem” is that someone really wants to use the technology. If that is the case, you should immediately abort.
Dan McKinley’s blog post “Choose Boring Technology”
In the long time since he wrote that post, I feel like a lot of the tech industry has matured in it’s approach and learned these lessons – We’re not jumping onto the bleeding edge new-fangled tools as much, and instead developers and engineers are sticking towards tried and tested design patterns in order to achieve the business goals.
No Hayden, this doesn’t mean I’ll write PHP.
But it feels like in telecom at least, leadership teams have not learned this lesson.
Every telco conference I go to I hear about “telco to tech co transformation” in presentations from telecom CTOs on the verge of retirement, and it’s bullshit.
We are a boring tool – Telecom is the boring technology.
Boring it may be, but customers have only shown a demand for connectivity from telecom operators.
End customers aren’t showing demand for TV content from their operators (sports rights anyone?), bundled services, AI something, metaverse, connected cars, crypto, 5G slicing, containers, edge, robotic surgery or whatever else is being shilled as the next best thing for telecom operators.
The idea of diversifying into other revenue streams fails to ask the question of why telcos would be better suited to deliver value in those markets than literally every other organization on the planet. In the majority of cases, there’s no strong case to be made for telcos to take the lead here. Telecom projects generally have a much higher failure rate than that of most other sectors in tech, so why would telcos be best suited to these new industries?
Customers have consistently shown demand for fast, reliable, affordable access to connectivity, and only that.
That’s what customers want from us as an industry – We should have a laser like focus on delivering that, better and better year on year, and not chasing distractions.
As an example, go to Google Maps reviews, or Down Detector and find the feedback from customers of any given telco. While telcos crow about NPS the lived experience of customers – justified or not, is often pretty piss poor.
Chasing becoming a tech-co distracts from the core business for a network operator, of, well, operating the network.
Any talk of “business transformation” and shifting to becoming a tech-co just distracts from that mission.
We’re largely utilities and we’re not sexy, but that’s okay.
We all know Bell Labs, Australia’s Telecom labs and others produced some amazing technology inventions and were at the forefront of tech in their day – Shockley, Shannon, etc. But that was finished by the 1970s, and required a state monopoly and with an R&D budget that rivaled that of many small countries.
That monopoly is gone, and that money is gone. We can’t compete on broad tech innovation.
But consistently, since the telephone was first introduced in the 1800s, communications has been what customers want.
What we do isn’t shiny, but it is critical, and there’s still plenty of room for improvement in our space, to do things better.
I hope we as an industry focus on just doing what we do now but better, and embrace being a boring technology.