Sunday, December 30, 2007

One Tool Fallacy

It interests me that people seem to keep searching for the one application where they can spend the bulk of their time. At the very same time I cannot help but notice that nearly everyone is using a proliferation of not only tools but platforms on which to run tools.

A great deal of time is no doubt spent with integration. But it is a sort of building on sand project I think. Just as firms of old used to chase the Holy Grail of unified systems (remember SAP?), now individuals hope to have self-info-hegemony.

Not bloody likely. Here's why:

You see everything IS miscellaneous (D. Weinberger). We have power to track and subdivide, so no one is likely to let any one supplier proliferate. There seems to be no competitive or innovative advantage to being big anyway. So, things fragment while capitalists fund nuanced differences from relatively well accepted standards. And, at the risk of value judgment, this is entirely a good thing. Better still, free software geeks cloistered in some info-grotto kill themselves to pump out free versions. Yay!

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