Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... it doesn't matter if a competitor ships buggy RoR-based systems a few months earlier. You hit the nail on the head! However, I would like to mention that competition is only one very important factor. I'd add that IT is a cost as it is a baker for a bakery, a cook for a restaurant, a mechanic for a repair shop. Do you want to be the n.1 restaurant? Then you must pay, so that your business is good food , not mar…
> Do you want to be the n.1 restaurant? Depends on what you mean by "n.1". The "n.1" restaurant in terms of monetary value is McDonalds. They do market (heavily). They don't pay for the best cook (not anywhere near). And they don't have the best recipes. But they are wildly successful. Conversely, michelin star restaurants go bankrupt all the time. There's nothing wrong with aspiring to produce michelin star code. Bu…
Standardization is why chain restaurants exist at all. They give people a way to get a meal they know is going to be of a certain quality at a certain price with a sufficiently low probability of being surprised. Surprises are, on the whole, generally negative: Good restaurants are few and far between, especially at the fast food price point, and a sufficiently bad surprise can have health implications. There's a reason one of the first chains was White Castle: White implies purity and a standard of cleanliness, as opposed to the local greasy spoon cafe where the only assurance of quality is that it hasn't been shut down yet.
So McDonald's pays for processes and materials that it can blast out into a million little restaurants, all the same, secure in the knowledge that minimum-wage workers can be sufficiently skilled and motivated to carry out those processes and use those materials the right way. Doing anything better might lead to a much improved experience in some restaurants but it will reliably lead to total disaster in others, which is utterly contrary to the business model.
By that standard, McDonald's is fairly high quality.