"Early bird gets the warm, the second mouse gets the cheese."

(W Nelson)

Which one would you be? The certain answer is: it depends...

Yes it depends, what is the actual situations, since all of us is going to win in all the situations. The real question is if we can identify if it is the bird or the mouse situation. Today when each day a new programming language borns, crypto-currencies are growing up and falling down, new infrastructure approaches wanting to change everything from the scretch while Moore's law is still heating the market you will raise the question of mouse and bird continuously.

Microservices? Virtualisation? Cloud? Sourcing? All of them is the same question. And there is no certain answer for being the first to try something new or wait a bit taking the risk of having competitive disadvantage to the others. I saw only a single recipe to react. You should be the first in most of the cases but be fast to survive when the mouse trap fires. Like the caffeinated squerrel in the Over the hedge movie:

This is a great example of the main target of your architecture:

Ability to change!

Do you have a good recipie to recognise the situation?