Claude Montpetit -- Montpetit.net -- en

Inertia does not mean that something is not moving. It means that once moving, slowly or not, a big object is hard to stop and does not easily change its headed direction.

For a company to succeed, it must have a lighter inertia than its market and competitors. It must react before its competitors to market change.

Size is an important attribute that affects inertia. The heavier the entity, the slower the response to change. It is a well known fact that inertia can cause big companies to collapse, but IBM in early 90s fought inertia and saved itself by radically changing its mission. Microsoft is fighting it continuously.

Countries with an economical system that depend on few specialities may have inertia problems. Say China becomes another India, and that it produces 1 million software engineers a year, and those engineers generally get the same type of education. China may end up with a powerful army of engineers that all specialize in the same field. Make this field obsolete, and inertia will hit them big time. Isn't this what happened to the soviet union? There were tones of excellent scientists specialized in defence and space development. These "markets" slowed down after the collapse of their social system and all the newly re-born countries were not able to change quickly enough to adapt to the reality of the western capitalist world. But capitalism is also monster. It has conquered almost every country in the world, and consumption is growing at a furious pace everywhere in the world. This consumption rate seems unstoppable.

Well, I am no economy expert, nor social philosopher, nor company visionary. This text just transcribes a thought I had this morning when hearing on the radio that consumers are still buying big 4x4s, and that our governments are thinking about voting new environment-friendly legislations that may only be effective in 2 years or more. This is true inertia, and who are we fighting? Nature. It is a big object that appears to accelerate toward an unpredictable goal. We just can't change our system fast enough to bring Nature back to its original path. Nature has adapted to our actions slowly but with all its weight, and I doubt we have the strenght, nor the will, to bring it back.

I guess this put me in the pessimists camp on this subject heh? Oh well...

Joel Spolsky has hit the nail right in with this entertaining essay entitled The Development Abstraction Layer

Explaining how important activities such as administration, IT, graphic design, marketing, sales, and support are important in a company, Joel writes that

[these activities] in a typical company, add up to about 80% of the payroll. It is not a coincidence that the Roman army had a ratio of four servants for every soldier. This was not decadence. Modern armies probably run 7:1. (Here's something Pradeep Singh taught me today: if only 20% of your staff is programmers, and you can save 50% on salary by outsourcing programmers to India, well, how much of a competitive advantage are you really going to get out of that 10% savings?)

This calculation does not consider that some of those activities may as well be outsourced to India but nonetheless, considering these numbers, the India advantage may not be such a big benefit for American companies (American referring to all coutries in America, the continent... including Canada, the United States, Mexico, and so on ... ;)

But the part I find most amusing is this one:

On the other extreme you have typical software companies built by ex-programmers. These companies are harder to find because in most circumstances they keep quietly to themselves, polishing code in a garret somewhere, which nobody ever finds, and so they fade quietly into oblivion right after the Great Ruby Rewrite, their earth-changing refactoring-code code somehow unappreciated by The People.

Been there, done that... I hate this sentence. But it is so tempting to go there again, do it again...