Sometimes corporate choices make no sense.

If you are a technical type person or if you are currently working a job in the IT world, then you have probably had this happen to you more than once, 'Corporations making bad technology decisions', specifically in the area of buying new software to help the business grow and make even more revenue -> here is fictional story to drive home my concern over this topic.

Company A has decided to purchase an expensive piece of software that will impact the entire company, will take many years to implement and really will not make a difference since the company has already built the software that provides functions that the new software will implement.

So Company A gets it down to 3 prospective candidates to purchase the software from.

Prospect #1 -> company's product is in dotNet.  The product is a bit expensive, but the product is well know, feature rich and has brand recognition that is valuable when new prospective clients are evaluating the  company to see if they want to use Company A's products and services.

Prospect #2 -> company's product is J2EE and the vendor is located in the same city as Company A.  This vendor's product is not as well known as Prospect #1, but matches the platform used by Company A and is local, so support would be very easy to get (they could physically come on-site to fix issues).

Prospect #3 -> company's product is written in a very old, non-enterprise language, python.  Each time a customization needs to be made, the vendor is charging extra.  This product requires a minimum of 20 production servers to meet the needs of Company A today, not counting on future growth.

So the senior/lead technology employees in Company A are asked to interview / evaluate / research each of the 3 vendors and provide a scorecard of which vendor closely meets the needs of Company A.

The scorecard is posted by the evaluation team (from best fit to worst fit) Prospect #2, then #1, dead last is vendor #3 (#1's score was 2 times the score of Prospect #3).

Guess which vendor was chosen by the top tier employees at Company A?  Vendor #3 was chosen.  So Company A has now invested millions of dollars on an outdated technology platform.  Why?  Good question that no technology person at Company A can really answer................