Evolution vs. Revolution: Overcoming Resistance to Change

Speaking in the con­text of tech­nol­ogy, Michael Crandell at GigaOM writes:

Take your­self back for a moment to 1990, to the era of duel­ing oper­at­ing sys­tems: OS/2 and Windows. At the time, many peo­ple still used MS-DOS, and Windows was new (and klunky). Microsoft had coop­er­ated with IBM to cre­ate OS/2 to over­come the lim­i­ta­tions of DOS by adding mul­ti­task­ing, pro­tected mode, and enhanced video APIs. OS/2, they both trum­peted, was a rev­o­lu­tion­ary com­put­ing platform.

Oops. Guess what? Turns out no one wanted rev­o­lu­tion­ary. We all wanted those improve­ments, to be sure, but we wanted them deliv­ered in a way that didn’t require redesign­ing and rewrit­ing our appli­ca­tions, or lim­it­ing the devices we could use. Voila! Windows 3.0 brought us evo­lu­tion­ary OS advances, and we all know who won.

Michael applies this les­son to “cloud com­put­ing,” a (some say) rev­o­lu­tion­ary approach to tech­nol­ogy infra­struc­ture that places data and appli­ca­tions in remote data cen­ters acces­si­ble via the Internet:

What does this have to do with cloud com­put­ing? Well, the same prin­ci­ple applies to cloud offer­ings today. The eas­ier a plat­form or ser­vice is to adopt for exist­ing appli­ca­tions and uses, the more pop­u­lar it’s going to be, whereas the more it breaks with cur­rent prac­tice, the less wide­spread its appeal.

But the les­son here is broader than the appli­ca­tion to cloud com­put­ing or even tech­nol­ogy. People gen­er­ally are resis­tant to change, espe­cially when it means throw­ing out work they’ve already invested in. This goes for changes in reg­u­la­tory schemes, legal stan­dards, APIs, user inter­faces, and busi­ness mod­els. If there can be this much resis­tance to a new approach that allows for cheaper, more flex­i­ble, and more rapid appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment, should it be any won­der that music labels or Hollywood so rabidly seek greater pro­tec­tions to pre­serve the busi­ness approach they’ve been using suc­cess­fully for so long? (Or that the elec­toral col­lege still exists?)

This is a fun­da­men­tal les­son that can be applied at many lev­els. It can mean brand­ing a rev­o­lu­tion­ary change as evo­lu­tion­ary. It can also mean pro­vid­ing a clear tran­si­tion to those impacted that pro­tects pre­vi­ous investments.

But the pref­er­ence for evo­lu­tion, for pro­tect­ing prior invest­ments, does not trans­late to requir­ing timid tech­no­log­i­cal, legal or social devel­op­ment. It merely means soft­en­ing the sense of change by giv­ing users, cus­tomers, or cit­i­zens some­thing to hold onto that pro­vides a famil­iar inter­face (in tech terms) to the new way.

A good les­son to remem­ber what­ever your field.

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