Do you have the guts to make the wrong technology choice?

Guts and experience, because sometimes the wrong choices are the right ones if you broaden time and system horizon. That argument can be misused by people wanting to take shortcuts — it is a grey area. But isn’t that where most interesting arguments lie?

Let me elaborate with an example.

At HashedIn, we were building a Point of Sale system with card swipe, cash drawer, receipt printer and offline functioning. We should have used native java with client server architecture. That was and still is the tested and tried technology for POS. But we chose a pure web application. It was the wrong choice — we had hacks for card swipe, receipt printer, offline etc. It wasn’t neat. In-fact every workaround was questionable and cringeworthy at the time and made us question our choices deeply.

Three years later, the solution is still under use. While there were some hiccups e.g. when AWS S3 went down last month, the maintenance costs have been low. We were able to release complex feature like demand based pricing in less than a couple of months across all stores and regions that increased revenues and margins.

Moreover, the chain acquired and expanded to 5 times its initial stores and opening a new store turned out to be super easy and inexpensive — squarely because of the wrong architecture. Get a laptop, chromebook or iPad with internet connection and just start!

You can also read Beating the Averages by Paul Graham, the founder of YCombinator. He elegantly talks about competitive advantage of using LISP for building a website. No one would say it was the right choice. But like every wrong choice, it makes you different from everyone else and gives advantages no one else does.

Summary

It takes guts to make the wrong technology choice. And experience to workaround it’s weaknesses, while maximising strengths. If you pull that off, its no longer the wrong choice. It is the right one!

I am working on MeetNotes.co, a meeting notes application for teams. If that sounds interesting, give it a spin here. If not, its cool.

Hope you enjoyed the post though!

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