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It's easy to conceive of why 80/20 dominates given
incomplete or ambiguous requirements and such. Just
remember that the alternative is to do all the work
under one root, and in our world, that means a framework
capable of subsuming all of the objects needed to
paint that screen and keep updating it from data stores.
Avalon puts us squarely back in 1991 as designs go
but in 2006 as hardware goes and into 2008 or later
as market penetration, therefore customer use goes.
Nothing new here but the timing is revealing as far
as the application of 80/20. One does it to keep
one's visions from overworking the land and creating
famine.
What Xanadu, Hytime, etc. left us were the ideas
and concepts. Pioneers clear land that farmers
plant on. That secures the future unless the farmers
are also landgrabbers with faked claims and limited
techniques such as slash and burn. Otherwise, things
work as they should. Systems are built over past
research as the environment can support them.
It is most useful to me to understand 80/20 as a
limited objective, so a limited result and that is as
good as the result is encapsulated. It is when
it has to scale or cope with other niches that the
ecosystem begins to stress. Stress creates
churn. Note that the patent wars would not be so
attractive had open source not decided to make
claims of driving costs to zero. It's not cathedral
and bazaar: it's Wal-Mart Vs MomAndPopGrocer and
outsourcing vs SillyValley. When the ecosystem churns,
opportunities move elsewhere and then the fun begins
because what was merely a technical fight among the
geeks turns into a social problem for them. Instead
of a global village of peaceful trading, we will
have Thunderdome.
Users in the z, operations in the y, data objects
in the x. It could be a fun map to plot in real time
to watch the churning. Let's see Google do that!
len
From: Eric van der Vlist [mailto:vdv@dyomedea.com]
On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 15:27, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> The web is a collection of working broken hacks.
> That's the ultimate testament for 80/20 designs.
The ultimate testament for 80/20 designs is that 80% of the time the
80/20 is 80% subjective, caused by a lack of vision and/or a bad design
and just a poor excuse to refuse legitimate features!
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