Your Strategy Is What You Ship. I was reminded of this quote today, taught to me when I was a snot-nosed inexperienced consulting brat in the strategy practice of Booz-Allen & Hamilton. One of the more experienced consultants in the operations practice sneered at some inane observation I made one day and said “Your strategy is what you ship”.
Today’s strategy lesson – Microsoft’s developer tools and platform sdks. I am an MSDN subscriber and I get absolutely pounds of CDs from Microsoft and gigabytes of articles, tools, libraries, etc. It is a dizzying and confusing array of tools – and relatively pricey too. The imputed strategy here is “Microsoft only cares about enterprise developers – if you are a young, starving, novice programmer, there is no entry path to the Microsoft platform. You should go use PHP and Perl and Python and other environments that are cheap and easy to start with.” I doubt this is what any slidedeck at Microsoft says but that is sure how it feels.
