There’s a famous blog post by Dan McKinley called “Choose Boring Technology.” It’s been circulating in developer circles since 2015, and it’s more relevant now than ever. The core argument is simple: every new technology you adopt comes with a cost, and that cost is almost always higher than you think.

Yet businesses keep chasing the new thing. Kubernetes when a simple server would do. Microservices when a monolith works fine. The latest JavaScript framework when plain HTML and a bit of jQuery would solve the problem in an afternoon.

This isn’t a technology article. It’s a business one. Because the same principle applies to every technology decision a business makes.

The innovation tax

Every piece of new technology carries what you might call an innovation tax. It’s the time spent learning, troubleshooting, integrating, and maintaining something that hasn’t been battle-tested in your specific environment.

A brand-new AI analytics platform might promise incredible insights. But it also means:

• Training your team to use it
• Integrating it with your existing data sources
• Debugging issues that the vendor hasn’t encountered yet (because nobody has)
• Building workarounds for missing features
• Living with the risk that the startup behind it runs out of funding

A spreadsheet connected to your accounting software doesn’t promise incredible insights. But it works. Today. Without training. Without integration headaches. Without existential risk.

What boring technology looks like

Boring technology is technology that’s been around long enough to be well-understood. The bugs are known. The workarounds are documented. The community of users is large enough that your specific problem has probably been solved by someone else already.

Examples:

• Email instead of the latest team collaboration platform
• Spreadsheets instead of custom databases
• WordPress instead of the newest static site generator
• PostgreSQL instead of the newest NoSQL database
• Phone calls instead of yet another messaging app

These tools aren’t exciting. They’re not going to impress anyone at a tech conference. But they have a property that newer tools don’t: reliability.

McKinley’s original post introduced the concept of “innovation tokens” — the idea that every organisation has a limited budget for new, unproven technology. Spend those tokens wisely. Use them for the things that genuinely differentiate your business. For everything else, pick the boring option.

The “but we need to innovate” objection

This is the pushback we always hear. “If we only use boring technology, we’ll fall behind our competitors.”

Two responses.

First, your competitors are probably struggling with the same new technology you’re considering. Early adoption is not a competitive advantage if you can’t make the thing work reliably. Being second to adopt but first to actually extract value is a better position than being first to adopt and last to figure it out.

Second, innovation doesn’t mean new technology. It means new solutions. You can innovate in your business model, your customer experience, your pricing, your processes — none of which require a bleeding-edge tech stack. CSIRO regularly publishes research on innovation in Australian businesses, and the most innovative companies aren’t the ones with the newest technology. They’re the ones solving real problems in creative ways.

The real cost of novelty

Let’s talk about the hidden costs that nobody mentions in the vendor demo:

Hiring. If you adopt niche technology, you need to hire people who know it. That pool is smaller, which means higher salaries and longer recruitment timelines. Adopt well-known technology and you’ve got a much larger talent pool.

Onboarding. New employees can be productive faster with widely known tools. If your stack is exotic, every new hire needs weeks of ramp-up time just to understand the environment.

Support. Boring technology has extensive documentation, active forums, and established support channels. New technology has a Discord server and a developer who responds when they feel like it.

Longevity. Boring technology tends to stick around. Postgres has been reliable for decades. That hot new database-as-a-service startup might not exist in three years. Building your business on technology that might disappear is a risk most people underestimate.

When new technology makes sense

We’re not arguing that businesses should never adopt new technology. Sometimes the new option is genuinely better. The key is being honest about when that’s actually the case.

New technology makes sense when:

• The boring option genuinely can’t solve the problem
• You’ve tested the new option thoroughly in a non-critical environment
• You’ve accounted for the full cost of adoption, not just the subscription price
• The team has the capacity to learn and maintain it
• The vendor or project has a credible path to long-term viability

If you can tick all five of those boxes, go for it. If you can’t, stick with boring.

A practical framework

When evaluating any technology decision, ask three questions:

1. What’s the simplest tool that could solve this problem? Start there. If it works, stop.

2. What’s the cost of switching later? If the boring option works for now and you can switch to something better in a year without massive disruption, you haven’t lost anything by starting simple.

3. Who will maintain this in two years? Not the person selling it. Not the enthusiastic team member who’ll move on to the next shiny thing. The person who’ll be stuck keeping it running when nobody’s excited about it anymore.

The bottom line

Technology decisions should be driven by outcomes, not novelty. The goal isn’t to have an impressive tech stack. The goal is to have technology that works reliably, can be maintained by your team, and actually helps the business.

Sometimes that means adopting something new. Usually it means picking the thing that’s been working for everyone else for the past ten years.

Boring technology is a feature, not a bug. The most successful businesses we’ve seen aren’t the ones with the most advanced technology. They’re the ones with technology that just works, day after day, without drama.

That’s worth more than any demo will ever show you.