Case Study Of Building A Single Technology Platform

Register to read the introduction… Lee couldn't count on any internal team to build this platform, as he feared that the team would be biased towards their product and add features to the platform favouring their product. He also felt that if the new platform replaced VisualAge, existing product lines would have less influence and the team managing the platform will gain power. To gain the momentum for his idea, Lee wanted to assign OTI with the job of building the platform. OTI had skills in developing platforms and they had experience in developing a number of development tools in the past. OTI also gained experience and reputation in multi-OS development. Lee felt that out of all the teams inside IBM, OTI had the most experience in this area and they could quietly deliver the product. Lee selected OTI for 2 reasons: they had enormously skilled people in this space and as a separate subsidiary they weren't subject to all of the controls and management. They choose Java as their programming language as it was gaining momentum. OTI developed SWT ( Standard Widget ToolKit) to overcome the problems of Swings. They built the new platform which was named as Eclipse that provided multi-OS support, that had SWT integrated with it and, that included common functionality needed by most of the applications. They built Java IDE to show the value of the platform. Hence for all the above reasons, OTI was a leverage point for building the single platform.
6. How did the Java IDE help to sell the platform? How did the Linux OS support help/hurt the single …show more content…
A producer-consumer feedback loop was set up between the platform and Java tools to drive the right things to the platform. Building Java IDE on top of the new platform helped them to discover areas of improvement quickly. It also helped them understand the needs of future customers which in turn allowed them to reiterate faster and improve the quality of the platform rapidly. IBM’s announcement that SWG would deliver its major products on Linux put pressure on the already strained VisualAge teams. ISVs and customers complained about VisualAge’s extensibility and this made top management teams put more pressure on the VisualAge team to address the extensibility issue. As Eclipse technology previews were circulated in SWG, skepticism regarding the platform began to dissolve slowly .This made VisualAge management team realize that the new platform would not only solve their requirement to port their products to linux, it will also help them save lot of development effort which can be redirected towards adding more