How can you achieve distinction in your business, grow, and allow your developers to truly express their genius. It is through the exposure to landscapes, customer engagement, and technology that has never existed.
Certainly you can find these everywhere, not just the cloud. The advantage of the cloud is you do not require the setup and infrastructure to explore bucket projects with your engineers. The cloud service providers, the largest providers, make available on their platform in minutes access to the greatest and latest technology. You can allow your engineers to access artificial intelligence; voice technology; GPUs; IOT, and so much more… at any moment with near zero risk.
When you expose your engineers to scale, speed, and the ability to think outside the classic walls you invite innovation. Innovation in your market. Innovation in your organization. Perhaps not innovation in the technology itself (you are a consumer in this situation), but that is the benefit of being free from the ego of a “built here” bias.
As a technologist, I often see businesses struggle to invent technology backbones and infrastructures that already exist. They do this as the first step BEFORE building their innovation in the market. Imagine if they instead embraced what was already built, and simply built on top of it. Better security. Proven technology. A team that is supported by your cloud provider to give you help — the dream!
Yes, I can see advantage of owning a platform and building upon it. Certainly that is a fine strategy, and one I’d be happy to debate over a delicious cappuccino. I would ultimately agree, but perhaps only after the bucket project is complete and we have seen actual sales in the market. Only then would I dare invest to a larger product platform.
There is no risk with using a platform provider as such. There is speed in both creation, delivery to the market, and the lowest possible cost. The only risk is allowing ourselves to not be fancy, and to allow our ego focus on the quality of the work and not the authorship of it all.
Build, test, react to your customers, and let’s invent together.