At the last RUM meeting, there was a fairly lengthy discussion between Dan and Ben about good ways to get Ruby and Rails in the door at the larger companies — the UHCs, the Allinas, and the Wells Fargos of the world.
One of the arguments that you could use is the cost/productivity angle. Essentially, you can argue that your projects can get done faster, quicker and cheaper. A counter-argument was that the BigCo’s won’t buy into it unless it fits their technology stack (e.g. deploying Rails in a container).
I think there’s some other underlying causes for why BigCo’s aren’t able/willing to just switch, and here’s a braindump of some of the reasons. Keep in mind that there are always exceptions to the case, and that these are more stereotypes than anything, but I think it tends to be correct:
BigCo’s:
- Bureaucratic
- Top-Down decisions
- Committees
- Standards
- Structure
- Hard to take risks
- Monolithic
- Reactive
- “Lowest Common Denominator” Factor
LittleCo’s:
- Democratic
- Bottom-Up decisions
- Acting w/o meetings
- May dabble
- Flat
- Easier to take risks
- Diverse
- Bleeding Edge
- Best of Breed
So what’s the messsage I got from this? IMO, BigCo’s make their decisions partly based on prior experience other companies have had with the same thing. I would guess that PHP got popular in the LittleCo’s, where you might have had a couple geeks looking for a better way to build apps compared to Perl CGI. Dead simple integration with the most popular web server made it ubiquitous. And what do you know, places like Yahoo end up using PHP and publicizing it, thus making it “legitimate” for the BigCo’s to use.
If you want to get Ruby (and thus Rails) in the door at the BigCo’s, you need to work on getting them in the door at the LittleCo’s. But then, this issue comes into play ;)