HACKER Q&A
📣 detectiveninja

Do companies fail because of technology?


I have been thinking recently that most companies succeed despite technical implementations, not because of them. I mean things like doing ddd or picking nosql or whatever, or making "right" or "wrong" data model for the business at a specific point in time.

For example expedia/booking/hotels.com. Its was not possible for a person to search 10000 hotels in Rome if they are available on specific date, and at what price, so there was a problem, so you say, lets build a catalog of the rooms and their prices per day and we will keep it up to date and people can search it (and then buy people from google and charge the hotels more than we pay google and we are good to go).

Do you think the "worst" developer you know can build it?

Can anyone think of a company that failed because the devs did something "wrong"?

I know some that failed because of "we will rewrite everything" at some point, but did they really have a strong product in the first place?

Or asking in another way, does having super strong technical team improves the chances of product's success with good ROI (considering the price of super strong technical team)?

  👤 notoriousarun Accepted Answer ✓
Probably the biggest cause of failure is not making something people want.

The biggest reason people do that is that they don't pay enough attention to users.

For example, they have some theory in their heads about what they need to build. They don't go out there and talk to users and say "What do you want?" They just build this thing and then it turns out users don't want it. It happens time and time again.