Continuous deployment helps organizations in delivering high quality software fast through build, test and deployment automation. It gives earlier return on investment, earlier feedback and easy process of deployment. Is continuous deployment also good from business perspective?
Steve Blank, consulting associate professor at Stanford University, mentioned in his recent blog that from customer’s perspective, continuous deployment might mean dissatisfaction.
While continuous delivery is truly a better development process for engineering, it has profound impacts on a company’s business model and customer expectations.
He compared the waterfall delivery process of long release cycles with frequent continuous deliveries. Earlier while using waterfall, companies used to make product available in the market in some release versions. Companies’ revenue models were designed around the release cycles of waterfall engineering. In contrast to waterfall development, agile development delivers incremental and iterative changes on an ongoing basis, which impacts the revenue model as well. Companies can deliver product improvements via the cloud so that all customers get a better product over time.
Steve gave example of Adobe, which has now moved all products to the cloud and labeled them the Adobe Creative Cloud. Instead of paying for new products, customers now buy an annual subscription. It is good from the perspective of getting predictable annuity but not good from consumers’ perspective.
He described Adobe’s problem in using continuous deployment as follows:
While creating a predictable revenue stream from high-end users, Adobe has created two problems. First, not all Adobe customers believe that Adobe’s new subscription business model is an improvement for them. If customers stop paying their monthly subscription they don’t just lose access to the Adobe Creative Suite software (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) used to create their work, they may lose access to the work they created.
Second, they unintentionally overshot the needs of students, small business and casual users, driving them to good-enough replacements like Pixelmator, Acorn,GIMP for PhotoShop and Sketch, iDraw, and ArtBoard for Illustrator.
The consequence of discarding low margin customers and optimizing revenue and margin in the short-term, Adobe risks enabling future competitors.
Steve gave the example of Tesla also. Tesla makes a car incrementally better over time.
Tesla’s unilateral elimination of features already paid for without consumers consent is a troubling precedent for cloud connected durable goods. Second, Telsa’s elimination of model years and its aggressive marketing of the benefits of continuous development of hardware and software have set its current customers expectations unreasonably high. Some feel entitled to every new hardware feature rolled into manufacturing, even if the feature (i.e. faster charging, new parking sensors,) was not available when they bought their cars – and even if their car isn’t backwards compatible.
Model years gave consumers an explicit bound of what to expect. This lack of boundaries results in some customer disappointment.