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Still on the road so I'll keep this brief but I had a conversation yesterday with someone lamenting the progress of ideas in IT. Everything old being new again. To that I say 'not hardly.' Let's take an example all of us will be familiar with. In 1830 a man named Edwin Beard Budding wondered if the mechanism for a cloth cutting machine could be turned on it's side and used to solve another problem. The problem of cutting a large grass lawn and leaving it with an attractive finish. Budding's "lawn mower" was pure invention, it's design was the template for every successful model which came after it, but it was an awful cast iron monstrosity in itself. Unreliable and unwieldy to use it was a financially devastating failure for him and the very idea took years of innovation in the use of materials and refinement from generations of people to deliver the grass eviscerating, weed destroying machinery we push around the place less frequently than we should today. And it's the same with IT. You take cast iron ideas and refine them enough to fulfill the initial promise. So it might sound old to you, but it's not really. |
