A whole book could be devoted to spelling out the “natural” emergence of features on a platform, and identifying and accounting for the minor variations from platform to platform (the emergence sequences don’t repeat exactly for a variety of reasons). However, the similarities are obvious and universal enough that anyone with longitudinal familiarity with a couple of comparable platforms would recognize them.
This is the first in a series of examples to illustrate the way that functionality that had been implemented on an older platform appears on a newer platform. All the examples illustrate the point that, even though the functionality is there for anyone to see on the older platform, working and delivering business value, it only appears at its “proper time” on the newer platform.
See this post for a general introduction with example and explanation of this peculiar pattern of software evolution.
I have mostly selected companies that most readers may not be familiar with, to demonstrate the strength of the pattern and the way it affects all participants in a market, not just the well-known, mainstream companies. Also, I know them personally, and so can tell their stories from personal knowledge, instead of just repeating things I’ve read.
Example: Securant
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Old platform |
IBM mainframe |
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Old function |
Security services: ACF2, RACF |
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New platform |
Web server |
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New function |
Security services for Web applications were extremely basic, and focused on message encryption. Securant implemented mainframe-class user and application security. The same kind of companies that depended on mainframes for transaction processing were very attracted to Securant’s approach to Web applications. |
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Outcome |
Terrific product and sales traction despite product inadequacies and the company’s internal problems. The company was acquired for a good price by RSA Security in 2001. |
Securant was started by a couple of young programmers in their 20’s as a services business. They were hired by a large financial institution that was adding internet/web infrastructure to their IT infrastructure. Naturally, the web applications needed access to the programs and data on the mainframe systems, and those systems were protected by state of the art security systems. The financial company would have preferred to be protected by a security facility for the web just like it did for the mainframe, but none was available. So they agreed with these guys to build one.
The young programmers knew nothing about mainframes, and never bothered learning anything much about them. As far as they were concerned, mainframes were pretty useless things well on the way to becoming obsolete – why become an expert in steam engines in the 1930’s when internal combustion engines are obviously the future? So they focused completely and solely on what they knew, and built a ground-up application that met the business security needs as they understood them from the users, who were also barely familiar with what the mainframe had to offer.
Before long, the one-off services project became a very hot, rapidly growing product company. One of the many ironies in this project is that the father of one of the two founding programmers had run one of the mainframe security companies! But he had been estranged from his son for many years, and neither knew that the other was or had been involved in computer security. The father decided to come back from the retirement that had been funded by the sale of his security company, re-connected with his son, and you can imagine his amazement when he found out what that son had accomplished. The father saw the functionality he had on the mainframe, re-imagined and re-implemented for the new environment.
One of the powerful things about this pattern is that it’s like the tide or the current in a river – at the right point, it just pushes the vendors and functionality in the direction of the “flow,” and everything ends up moving in the same direction. The people involved tend to think they’re inventing things – but what they invent is pretty predictable, because they’re responding to the same kind of needs that the previous bunch of inventors were responding to.
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