It seems every other day there is a new battle brewing in the digital landscape. iPad vs eBook readers, iPhone vs Android, Apple vs Adobe, HTML5 vs Flash, Chrome vs IE9, Google Docs vs Microsoft Live Office…and the list goes on. With every new battle that starts there is another blogger tweeter techie know-it-all that comes up with an article explaining why participant in this battle is better than the other or why one will not last. AND to top that off, you have CEO’s of companies battling with these bloggers and other companies. It is very soap opera-ish. ”What will Steve Job’s do next? Will Google Chrome take over the world? When will Microsoft strike back? Stay tuned till next episode to find out.”
I am neither a CEO or a know-it-all but I have a different point of view that people are missing. Let me first start out with an analogy. Think back to when you were a kid and watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom (if you don’t remember this show, think Animal Planet). Theses were fascinating shows about wildlife. All sorts of wildlife. The big episodes or the episodes that were always cool to watch were with the Lion. The Lion is the main event. Always! At every zoo and every show, when there is a Lion, people stop and watch. So true with this show. Sometimes two Lions would fight. Sometimes they would just sleep all day. Other times they would hunt some prey. No matter what they were up too you were glued to the TV waiting for the Lion to attack…yes…a Wildebeest. The Lion would sneak up on a herd and take one down. They would feast for hours and then move on.
Now bear with me here, I am not comparing any of these technologies or companies to either the Lion or the Wildebeest, but just the battle. The battle would produce a ferocious scene; dirt flying everywhere, animals watching and running, blood spurting. Most of all, the Vultures would come to wait and benefit from the battle. Once the Lion was done, it was their time to feast.
I am a Vulture. I am going to feast on these battles. Why? It is because I am a technologist and I have too. The way I look at it is this; sure one technology will probably overtake the other but until then I will support both and deliver both. I will feast on the remains of the war of words and the war of the diverse technologies to deliver what is right, appropriate and on target to my clients.
Here is another example. One of my clients is a Fortune 500 client. Thousands of employees. They all use IE6. IE6 is bad. Real bad. Not only from a security standpoint but from a coding perspective as well. It is buggy, renders CSS differently than other browsers, and requires a lot of extra effort to make it work. There are sites out there that are not supporting it any more. But when a client is paying you to develop a web site and they cannot view it on their computer or better yet from, ANY of their company computers, that is a big time #FAIL. So what do we do? We do what they want us to do and make it work.
There are 2 rules in Customer Service that I learned from Stew Leonard’s:
Rule #1: Customer is always right.
Rule #2: If Customer is wrong, see Rule #1.
As a technologist, I am not going to deliver a solution that only works on X percentage of the devices that are out there. If I am building a web site, not only will it work in older browsers but mobile phones, netbooks, iPads, Android Tablets etc.
So what’s the point?
There are 2 points.
Point 1: You don’t have to rely on one technology to do a job. Each of the technologies in question came out because one does something different from the other. The questions should be, what are you trying to accomplish? Answer that first, then the technology will shake out from that. I had someone ask me about HTML5 vs Flash and what do we do since Flash is not available on the iPad. What are you trying to do? Will your customers go to your site on an iPad? If so, lets make an iPad enabled site and leverage what the iPad does best. Keep Flash for the desktop based site. What’s the problem with 2 or 3 different sites? You don’t wear dress shoes to go running. Choose the right tool for the job.
Point 2: While companies argue and battle regarding what technology will win, I will need to support all of them until there is a winner. By supporting all of them, I will deliver 100% coverage to my clients customers which makes everyone happy.
So the next time someone asks, “Will HTML5 take over Flash?” or “iPhone vs Android”, your response should be “I hope it is a long battle”.
and take the iPad. The kids are playing Tic-Tac-Toe and having a blast on it in the back seat. Kids A+. Me – C- because the screen was so bright it was annoying me on the way home.