

37Signals: Voting With Your Wallet - OneSeventeen
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1208-ask-37signals-voting-with-your-wallet

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stcredzero
I think lots of internal software at big companies would benefit tremendously
if you gave employees the opportunity to "vote with their wallets," or, for
that matter, with their feet.

If big companies were sane, they'd use a little free-market competition with
internal software projects and have 2 or 3 competitors for each piece of
internal software. Projects would be paid in proportion to the number of users
who actually used the software.

To prevent collusion and ensure true competition, just mandate that each team
use a different programming language. The "language wars" phenomenon will
ensure that the teams are rivals.

This also means, to ensure interoperability and internal control, that big
companies would have to create internal infrastructure and well defined
standards.

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j2d2
_If big companies were sane, they'd use a little free-market competition with
internal software projects and have 2 or 3 competitors for each piece of
internal software. Projects would be paid in proportion to the number of users
who actually used the software._

This is exactly how the financial world works. It's expensive, but they've got
loads of cash to experiment. I think with any field that has reasonably large
systems it would be hard to devote enough time to know for sure you made the
right decision. Some good financial systems can take two years to get halfway
done and requirements change as the project grows and the markets change.

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stcredzero
Department of Defense has also done experiments like this.

