Thursday, January 25, 2007

Competing on the Basis of Speed

Concept of "fast companies":
Dell: through speed - significant cost advantage due to low cost infrastructure. They have cheap price per component not because they buy cheaper - they buy at same price of course, but cheaper surrounding infrastructure. (1:25)
Toyota: Brought Prius from concept to market in 15 months
Google: competes on speed in software dev area

Competing on basis of speed gives : 1) a significant competitive advantage, and 2) a large barrier to entry - companies need to catch up.

Things that kill speed:
complexity
3 faces of complexity
  1. waste: anything that depletes resources/effort/space/money - keep it simple
  2. Inconsistency: uneven, unbalanced, etc - make it flawless
  3. overload: excessive or unreasonable burden - make it flow
1) waste
Keep common infrastructure
achitecture/convention/tools
keep simplifying the code via refactoring

a dev process that anticipates change will result in software that tolerates change

Toyota's design process:
"set based design" (9:45)
They have 10 engines and pick one before production - not use one and keep making changes.
Makes decision as late as possible

Make decisions reversible whenever possible
-when change creates complexity, refactor

Paused at 13:00... fascinating, but getting sleepy...

Watch: google video

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