I love house flipping shows. They are perfect for background TV watching, which is just about all I have time for with a 6-year-old at home. My favorite show and the greatest of all time is the HGTV’s original “Flip or Flop” with Tarek and Christina. They make flipping look so easy. And profitable! It must be nice to completely remodel a kitchen for just a few thousand dollars. Where *do* they find those general contractors?
Imagine if Tarek and Christina just started flipping the same house over and over. First a new coat of paint. Then new countertops. Next a new lawn. And so on. For years. Decades even.
That’s the current state of the Web Content Management industry.
Even legends like Tarek and Christina couldn’t save WCM vendors from all their endless house flips that equate to not much more than superficial updates. Let’s dig in and look at three examples:
A Fresh Coat of Paint on OpenText Web Content Management
OpenText Web Content Management is the new name for Interwoven TeamSite. TeamSite, along with Vignette, pioneered the WCM category all the way back in the late 90s. Since then, the TeamSite house has been flipped so many times over the years it’s hard to keep track. I mean, it does look pretty on the outside now.
Much better than it looked back in my days as a Sales Engineer at Interwoven in 2001.
But that’s the thing about house flipping. Underneath all the glamour of new kitchen countertops and shower tiling lies a foundation that was built for a time when websites were a bunch of HTML and image files and Perl was the language-du-jour. The core architecture of TeamSite hasn’t changed since the late 90s, and while that approach worked well when managing websites worked as like managing source code files, it hasn’t suited the needs of a modern digital experience for well over a decade.
The “Flip or Flop” lesson? Just applying a reapplying a fresh coat of paint over and over again doesn’t result in a better house: just a house with better curb appeal.