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Continuous release is if anything better for innovation. It allows for constant updates meaning continuous innovation. Long development cycles lead to slow feedback, and updates have to be planned long in advance which means it takes years for innovation to reach production and that taking risks with the next big development is scarrier. It is easier to roll back a release when continuously delivering, rolling back a product that has been in development for 18 months is harder. Hardware is more natural to do in larger cycles than software but software doesn't really have any benefits from long dev cycles.
I think we are partially seeing diminishing returns on investment. It is simply much harder to make a freezer 10% more energy efficient today compared to in 1970. Expecting a radically new toaster every year isn't really feasible.
As for the big banks they have so much legacy code and so many entrenched interests that I think it is hard for them to make big changes. The fin-tech scene is moving fast and I think that consumers are going to be using other services soon.
2 claims here:
Your argument makes sense theoretically, but can you name any MAJOR innovations by companies that are known to use this model? Cause I can't think of one.
I understand your argument about diminishing returns on investment, but I'm now reminded of the Ford quote,
And I think that the continuous release cycles reemphasize feedback from people saying they want faster horses, so people make faster horses. You don't get the larger POV that their are fundamentally different ways of approaching a problem which occasionally come with far better outcomes. I don't want to make any claim that continuous development and agile have no place, but it seems to me that it doesn't contribute to larger innovations that can update the fundamentals of society the way the car did.
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Legacy code is one problem of the "continuous improvements" style.
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That's a good point, but I remember a few years ago, people were lauding that innovations like the self driving car were expected 15 years prior, but the fact was that good software infrastructure hadn't existed which slowed down development. Those people usually were saying that now that there had been two decades of software infra development, we were finally about to see some serious shit come out. To some degree they were right. The self driving car, as an example, really is a reality now, but regulation is now the limiting factor. I'm not sure if this applies to other things as well, though.
I can say at least as someone who's been in software for the last decade, our work is significantly significantly slowed down by regulatory adherence, like more than you can possibly imagine. I'd venture to say that most major systems at big tech companies that I know about probably either spend greater than 50% of their time trying to prove they are compliant, or else are systems that are purely designed to help other systems prove their compliance. Right now, the later case are the systems which provide the most measurable value at big tech companies, by means of accelerating the development of other systems. So maybe that's the next big hurdle, now that we're past the development of good infra systems, we now have the unforeseen task of creating good governance and compliance systems.
Edit: And I don't mean to imply that regulation and governance infra are wasting time and energy, I actually believe that these systems do strongly positively impact end-customer privacy, ensure that the data is being used safely. It's just that it's not very evident to people outside the company exactly where all the time and effort is going. At best, customers can take big tech at their word on their statements and promises about customer privacy, and at worst they'll think they're talking out of their asses.
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PG remarked on continuous release as early as 2003:
Development speed brings a quality of its own.
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