Are today’s platform benefits tomorrow’s constraints?

One of the challenges facing OSS / BSS product designers is which platform/s to tie the roadmap to.

Let’s use a couple of examples.
In the past, most outside plant (OSP) designs were done in AutoCAD, so it made sense to build OSP design tools around AutoCAD. However in making that choice, the OSP developer becomes locked into whatever product directions AutoCAD chooses in future. And if AutoCAD falls out of favour as an OSP design format, the earlier decision to align with it becomes an even bigger challenge to work around.

A newer example is for supply chain related tools to leverage Salesforce. The tools and marketplace benefits make great sense as a platform to leverage today. But it also represents a roadmap lock-in that developers hope will remain beneficial in the years / decades to come.

I haven’t seen an OSS / BSS product built around Facebook, but there are plenty of other tools that have been. Given Facebook’s recent travails, I wonder how many product developers are feeling at risk due to their reliance on the Facebook platform?

The same concept extends to the other platforms we choose – operating systems, programming languages, messaging models, data storage models, continuous development tools, etc, etc.

Anecdotally, it seems that new platforms are coming online at an ever greater rate, so the chance / risk of platform churn is surely much higher than when AutoCAD was chosen back in the 1980s – 1990s.

The question becomes how to leverage today’s platform benefits, whilst minimising dependency and allowing easy swap-out. There’s too much nuance to answer this definitively, but the one key strategy is to try to build key logic models outside the dependent platform (ie ensuring logic isn’t built into AutoCAD or similar).

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