"Eating your own dog food" occupies a special space in my line-up of irritating business cliches -- right between "perfect storm" and "death spiral". It's annoying not only because it's over-used, but also because the actual practice of forcing employees to use their own product is often a bad idea. Here are two reasons:
1. Apples and Oranges
Never use your own product because it's "the right thing to do."
I first encounered the phrase back in 1998 when I was working at Apple's Claris group. The executives insisted that we move our back office from the clunky-but-stalwart Sybase enterprise rdbms to our own FileMaker DB product. FileMaker made a fine weekend-warrior, non-techie solution to building a personal library or wine inventory DB. But running backend systems for a division of a fortune 500 company? The execs had no understanding of the limitations of the product. This decision made about as much sense as, say, the shipping department at Mattel Toys swapping out their semi-trucks for a fleet of Big Wheels to make deliveries. Ultimately, the
execs were eating their own words instead of dog food, and in a final desperate act, sold their souls to a pack of Oracle reps in a game of "Three-card Monty" that took place in the parking lot one night.
The sentiment was right, but the judgment clouded. Sure, it's great to use your product when it makes sense. Maybe it's to help your Finance group save on Cap Ex. Or, maybe your Marketing and Sales teams stands to lose face if you publicly acknowledge using your competitor's product. But to force your employees to use it because of some equivocal set of morals or principles? There must be a compelling match between the company's needs and the product's feature set, or there's only going to be disappointment.
2. Ostriches
Never use your own product simply because you hate your competition.
I once had a co-worker tell me that she refused to use a certain social software product simply because it was a competitor to a product that she'd previously worked on. This struck me as crazy because the competitor was kicking the crap out of her former company. Didn't she want to know what the competition was up to? What their strengths and weaknesses were? How they treat their users and communicate with them? No. In her mind, any additional traffic or usage statistics ceded to her competitor were anathema. She simply couldn't stand the idea... so she buried her head in the sand, and had no idea how the competitor's product worked. Or, consequently, why it was kicking their asses.
I wonder what you'd find in the backpacks and messenger bags of the product teams that work on the Zune? My bet is that they all use Zunes exclusively -- which is why it's such a dismal product. You can't take on a leader like the iPod and hope to take marketshare if you don't understand completely what you're up against. You have to admit that it's simply a better product and then try to improve on it or do something radically different.
(Can you imagine what would happen if Yahoo dropped Panama on it's ear and switched to AdSense? )
Eat the other guy's dog food once in awhile. It probably won't kill you, and you might just learn something.