Don’t build new platforms

During the last months, I’ve met with several companies that had an interesting common denominator: they were all building a new platform to replace a legacy platform and things weren’t going so well. The legacy platform often is decades old and has functionality in it that’s the result of hundreds of person-years of effort. And it typically forms the basis for a significant part, if not the entire, product portfolio.

When the new platform effort is initiated, the organization accepts that it will take some time (years) to build it to a point that it can replace the legacy platform. As stalling the product portfolio is unacceptable, there will be a continuous flow of development effort into the old platform to realize the features that are needed right now. This, of course, happens in parallel to the new platform effort. The consequence is that the goal for the new platform becomes a moving target as the legacy platform is continuously adding new functionality that the new platform will need to add as well in order to achieve feature parity.

There are three possible outcomes in this scenario. The first is also the worst: the new platform effort forever fails to achieve feature parity. As a consequence, no product line is willing to move over to it. At some point, there’s a change of management, the new platform effort is reviewed and the track record to date leads to an obvious conclusion: the new platform is canceled. The result is that the company is stuck with the old platform and has lost years of time and hundreds of person-years of R&D effort without any business benefit.