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If the company uses Hadoop, it can a) get its engineers to give a talk at a Hadoop conference, resulting in marketing [logo shown prominently around the conference], PR, and recruitment gainz; b) get articles published about how the company uses cutting edge technology to do new things and all the other CIOs and big shots better listen up, resulting in prestige, PR, and recruitment gainz; (this happened to a client in real life) c) reasonably field interrogatory questions from other fad followers, whether they are investors, journalists, peers, or whomever. When asked "How is YourCorp using data science and Big Data?", being able to say "We have a team working with that" is much better than having to say "Our guy Bob says that's just a fad, so we don't really 'do that'". This is basically a PR gain, but it means that investors and clients will feel the company is cutting edge, instead of backward philistines who listen to Bob all the time. I could go on but it's pretty boring. The point is that business is all about the customer's perception of the company as something to which they want to give money. If the business does not appear to be following the trends, they will be substantially harmed, because people do not want to get involved with an outmoded business. Being perceived as the last to adopt a new technology looks bad. |