Last week we attended the first Fuel conference in London hosted by Carsonified the folks behind FOWA and FOWD. This was a great event that seemed to reach out beyond the usual Web 2.0 community crowd. We were fortunate to have a short speaking slot thanks to our relationship with Microsoft. We knew that we were going to promote Microsoft but wanted to convey a message that we felt was important. We decided to dedicate our 8 minutes to ‘how to choose a technology’. The talk focused on three areas that we believe are most important in terms of making this decision and then how Microsoft addresses these.

Our three primary objectives when choosing a technology were: reducing time to market, minimising cost and the ability to integrate with other products and services. These were born out of our experience of working with a cross section of clients from start-ups to traditional businesses. The first two cross-over and also raise some other important considerations when looking at different technology options.

Reducing time to market naturally means shorter dev times and therefore leads to reduced cost. At the same time we do not want to sacrifice reliability, scalability and user experience in order to cut the initial dev time. Getting a product to market that has poor user experience or doesn’t work is a waste of time. Minimising cost often leads to a focus on the start-up costs of technology (e.g. how much do the tools and software cost) but I also raised the issue of over time costs such as the price of scaling. The final objective concerning integration may seem to be born of Web 2.0 and the mashup generation but to be honest it has had around a long time with many websites integrating with existing business backend systems for some time.

Talking about technology is always tricky as while it is important it’s never exactly entertaining stuff, despite the introduction of baked beans. I thank those who made complimentary remarks afterwards and to Microsoft for asking us to speak in their slot.

We now look forward to October when Jeremy will be speaking at Future of Web Apps about building desktop apps on your web app.