DEV Community

Cover image for Is New Tech Always Better?
Hasan Elsherbiny
Hasan Elsherbiny

Posted on

Is New Tech Always Better?

a few days ago ,I ran into a question asked by a junior developer which was
"Are There Companies Still Using ASP.Net MVC Technology?"

the question was wondering if there some companies still using old/outdated technology while there is a newer version of this technology and the upgrade is not really hard.

but that question let me notice that people usually think the "New Tech" is equivalent to "Better Tech" , but is this really true?

let's walk through some new tech (at it's first release) and see if the new tech is always better or not?
for example "Silverlight" a product introduced by Microsoft as a replacement of adobe flash with a lot of promising features and improvements and a lot of propaganda about why this product will shape the future , but as you may know things didn't go this way

Is New Tech Always Better?
the same criteria applies to tones of frontend frameworks and a lot of products introduced by google, apple Microsoft and many other big tech companies ,not only software products but hardware as well.
with the announcement of these products people start to talk about how amazing these products are and how fast they will jump into using them right after they are released, other may brag about using the latest technology in their projects as if this is the stamp of quality and advance.

but why does this happen?
as i mentioned before with the announcement of a new product, there are a lot of propaganda and a lot of promises about the feature, for sure some of these promises are real and also some of these products are revolutionary and out of the box , that made people think if it's new for sure it's better.

in terms of software it's not correct to start using new tech immediately for some reasons

  • new tech = new bugs/issues
  • less community (because for sure community comes after popularity and real features not only promises)
  • compatibility
  • upgrading costs

and to answer the question I started with "Are There Companies Still Using ASP.Net MVC Technology?"
yes there are for the reason mentioned earlier and also because it's not very outdated.

Top comments (6)

Collapse
 
ingosteinke profile image
Ingo Steinke, web developer • Edited

New tech can have an important role in challenging established solutions. Sometimes the old solutions get deprecated (disruption), sometimes they keep up and make the new product obsolete, and often times both will stay and offer alternative solutions, which is not a bad thing either. Sometimes new tech is just an overhyped fad. Old mature technology can have a lot of advantages, see SQL, bash, and HTML.
There was an interesting post earlier this year: Bun hype. How we learned nothing from Yarn

Collapse
 
hasanelsherbiny profile image
Hasan Elsherbiny

totally agree with you, but my whole point is about "people usually think new is better"

Collapse
 
ingosteinke profile image
Ingo Steinke, web developer

I don't disagree! In many situations, new is not better, but it depends.

Thread Thread
 
hasanelsherbiny profile image
Hasan Elsherbiny

exactly

Collapse
 
kaamkiya profile image
Kaamkiya • Edited

You're right, not always. It's very rare that the first stable release of something will be good. It generally ends up being used by no one. Most older technology is more mature, stable, and has a large community, making it easier to learn.

Collapse
 
hasanelsherbiny profile image
Hasan Elsherbiny

exactly