My team is responsible to provide a platform for our internal users. We already cover 80% of them and are planning to expand to the rest.
We've chosen a technology X a few years ago but an alternative has been raising up and is now the de-facto standard. Many coworkers (outside of my team) are complaining we are not using the latest shiny technology.
This feeds rumors and discontent in my department. Sadly nearly all people complaining are doing it in my back and no-one is ever bringing factual arguments for a technology change.
We've invested a lot in the current technology, it serves really well and I can't build a reasonable rationale for change. All my management is aligned at the moment with our current choice and support my team.
Actual problems:
- my team is seen as the "old timers that don't want to change"
- rumors, plots and rambles are hard to live with. Especially since the debate does not really happen in the open.
- taking debate in the open is not that easy either since I'm convinced both technologies would work if we started from scratch. There is simply not enough gain in changing technology and migration would require very significant investment
- our current technology is not super shiny and it may slow down recruitment (even though hires that accept to come anyway are usually happy once they overcome the "it is not very hype" and realize the good work we're doing)
- most of our current users don't really care about our choice, providing we improve their experience with the platform
- most of people asking for another technology actually don't really know challenges to run things at large scale (my understanding is their experience is based on running things in their home server)
I'd really appreciate any advice on how to deal with this situation.