Maybe I'm in a bad mood, but this seems to be a poorly researched article that throws around lots of catchphrases and unsourced claims in a way that speaks to people's prejudices. Which means that people want to accept it, but shouldn't blindly.

Let's work our way through it.

It starts with a claim that there is a 10x gap between software leaders and the rest. Where does that figure come from? Is there any data backing it up? If you dig in you'll find that the figure dates back to some poorly researched studies in the 1970s and originally was about individual software developers. There isn't any backing to this as a figure for organizations as a whole.

Next we have a reference to the innovator's dilemma that completely gets Clayton Christensen's thesis wrong. His actual thesis is that companies are very, very good at adopting improvements that they see as necessary to improving their core competency. What companies are bad at is jumping on inferior (by the measures their current market uses) technologies that are about to destroy that market. He offers lots of examples and his follow up book, The Innovator's Solution, walks through the internal organizational reasons for WHY it is so hard.

It is well worth understanding this thesis. However it has absolutely nothing to do with building a better website.

The too big to innovate section had no flaws that I see.

The technological legacy and technical debt section comes closer to the mark - then misses it entirely. The truth is that any organization has a culture, core strengths, and core weaknesses that are part of the corporate DNA. These matter and are very, very hard to change. These will determine what organizations are good at. "Digital natives" don't simply win by not having to spend on maintenance - my experience is that their ratio of maintenance work to new development isn't different than anyone else's. They win by having cultures, processes and decision making that work better for software. Cultural elements like not trying to use schedule pressure to motivate developers, processes that try to surface potential problems as quickly as possible, and decision making that works hard to avoid a blame based culture.

Unfortunately you would learn none of that from this section. You would learn more about actual core organizational problems from http://funnyshit.com.au/the_plan.html and http://www.tamingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/tree-sw.... (Both of these highlight very, very real problems. The Plan illustrates the consequences of information traveling through an organization where each hears what they got in line with the bias that they want, then communicates upwards the best sounding thing that fits their understanding. It takes serious discipline to counteract this. And the project management cartoon demonstrates exactly how each role tends to fail.)

Skills and talent would have been an excellent place to raise some of these points. Would have been. Opportunity missed. Instead we get trite comments about how talent perceives big companies, with no useful information on why they are that way or what would be required to change.

Next, outsourcing. As a US based developer I like calls to reduce outsourcing, but this one is sadly just wrong. All of the big "digital natives" have outsourcing as a component of their development, and make it work. The actual tradeoff is that outsourcing adds delays and creates cultural challenges, but makes for cheaper development. Proactively address the challenges, outsource things where development speed is not a priority, and outsourcing is a very viable piece of your development. It should be part of the puzzle for any large company.

And finally we come to their proposed solution. But if the real problems are not understood, then there is no reason to believe that the solution will work. In reality I would expect that the high performing team will come in, perform its project well, generate resentment, get no traction, and never figure out how the surrounding organization is sabotaging itself.

And now I'm going to need to read some Steve McConnell to get the bad taste of this article out of my system.