A parable for software development
A client who wants a web app, and their internal IT told them they should use Ruby on Rails. During our initial exploratory period, we discovered that there was no existing quality libraries or Ruby Gems that covered their needs in Ruby. Now, Ruby is not a terrible language by far, but there simply wasn’t the tools to build this at this time.
Now, if we were a Ruby-only house, we would just charge them more to develop everything from scratch, and charge them to maintain it for the foreseeable future. Great short-term business model for us, but not so perfect for them; In other words, precisely why we are not that way; we want to save our customers money because when they succeed, we succeed.
How do we help you reach your goals? Well, we are your dedicated CTO, we are not just a Ruby-only house. In our exploratory meetings, we had our PHP and Node.js experts on hand. Both of whom quickly pointed out that there were specialty libraries that were established and clean in their languages, and that we could implement this entire system in likely half the time using those software libraries.
So, we finished off the work outline document with a quote for Ruby which ended up being almost double the quote for developing the same app in Node.js or PHP. We explained the reasons we felt that we did not need to stick with Ruby; They wanted to use a cloud service that supported Ruby, and there were similar, equally-priced ones that supported other languages. Moreover, we explained why we felt that using PHP or Node.js would save money in the long run.
If we were a one-trick pony house, but exquisite at that one trick, you would not get the best options.
