>If a company (like Microsoft with Excel) is slow but eventually gets there, then they are successful.
Excel was successful because Lotus decided 123 had so much technical debt it would be a good idea to "upgrade" the old assembler code to C. This took at least a year longer than planned, and introduced a lot of bugs and incompatibilities.
Meanwhile Windows had arrived, and the planned Windows rewrite of 123 never happened as scheduled.
So it wasn't so much that technical debt killed 123. But poor management of technical debt certainly did.
Effectively the C rewrite was a complete waste of time, and Lotus should have aimed for a Windows release as soon as they could.
It's nice to be able to say this with hindsight, but it was doubtless much less obvious at the time, when Windows was barely considered a mediocre visual DOS shell, and certainly not a serious OS.
Bottom line - you have to be smart, prescient, and a little lucky to manage technical debt. It's not just about getting the code right - it's making decisions with educated guesses about where you may be a year or two from now.
Excel was successful because Lotus decided 123 had so much technical debt it would be a good idea to "upgrade" the old assembler code to C. This took at least a year longer than planned, and introduced a lot of bugs and incompatibilities.
Meanwhile Windows had arrived, and the planned Windows rewrite of 123 never happened as scheduled.
So it wasn't so much that technical debt killed 123. But poor management of technical debt certainly did.
Effectively the C rewrite was a complete waste of time, and Lotus should have aimed for a Windows release as soon as they could.
It's nice to be able to say this with hindsight, but it was doubtless much less obvious at the time, when Windows was barely considered a mediocre visual DOS shell, and certainly not a serious OS.
Bottom line - you have to be smart, prescient, and a little lucky to manage technical debt. It's not just about getting the code right - it's making decisions with educated guesses about where you may be a year or two from now.
And that's hard.