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Not exactly original. It would be less offensive if he labeled it something other than "My Take" http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/000

by mpm 16y ago

Not exactly original. It would be less offensive if he labeled it something other than "My Take" http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/000772.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/0...

mkramlich 16y ago
Many supposedly new ideas are not "original," I think. There is often just 1 person, or a few, who might publicly proclaim it or document it in such a way that it becomes widely disseminated, accepted or believed. Or one person who takes 5 old ideas and smooshes them together in one particular new mashup. To give one easy example, I personally was doing Agile and Refactoring and Design Patterns looooong before a popular term for them swept the industry and the fads came. And lots of folks were running automated software tests before the Unit Testing (tm) fashion began -- even if they were in the minority, not the mainstream. And I'm sure I wasn't the only one. In the case of 37Signals and enterprise software, I'm sure there were at least hundreds and perhaps thousands of people before who both used that sort of software and independently had their own theories as to why it sucked. The whole "captured audience" element and "afraid to declare a project a failure for fear of losing job" were pretty obvious, I'm sure, at least as far back as the 80's (that I can confirm personally anyway.) I saw this kind of template for so-called "discoveries" and "innovation" so much that I coined my own private term for it, "Discovering the Obvious" or DTO. So what I'm saying is, citing an article from 2005 where somebody made a similar set of observations/predictions about enterprise software does not invalidate or lessen the value of what somebody else said in 2007. Nobody owns ideas: they're often independently arrived it in parallel by widely dispersed groups, and can even disappear and reappear in a culture, in cycles, over time. Heck, the bookstore is full of books written or published in just 2010 where the authors share earth-shattering new secrets about love and life that arguably have been well-covered in tons of books that came out in past decades if not centuries and were even known as far back as that ancient uncivilized barbarian Will Shakespeare. But thanks for the link! :) Too much caffeine today.
dasil003 16y ago
That's a massively superior article, but what makes you think that Jason read that?
- mpm 16y ago
  A month earlier someone posted a link to the same email as a comment to a different 37signals post http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/define_enterprise_in_10_words_or_less.php#c9633 http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/define_enterprise_in_10_w...
  - dasil003 16y ago
    oh snap!
  - btilly 16y ago
    A link posted last month does not explain a 37 signals post from 2007. (Though I must say that it does seem very similar, and that email did get wide circulation.)
    - mpm 16y ago
      Not last month, a month earlier than the post in question. Check the timestamp.

by mpm 16y ago

mkramlich 16y ago

Many supposedly new ideas are not "original," I think. There is often just 1 person, or a few, who might publicly proclaim it or document it in such a way that it becomes widely disseminated, accepted or believed. Or one person who takes 5 old ideas and smooshes them together in one particular new mashup. To give one easy example, I personally was doing Agile and Refactoring and Design Patterns looooong before a popular term for them swept the industry and the fads came. And lots of folks were running automated software tests before the Unit Testing (tm) fashion began -- even if they were in the minority, not the mainstream. And I'm sure I wasn't the only one. In the case of 37Signals and enterprise software, I'm sure there were at least hundreds and perhaps thousands of people before who both used that sort of software and independently had their own theories as to why it sucked. The whole "captured audience" element and "afraid to declare a project a failure for fear of losing job" were pretty obvious, I'm sure, at least as far back as the 80's (that I can confirm personally anyway.) I saw this kind of template for so-called "discoveries" and "innovation" so much that I coined my own private term for it, "Discovering the Obvious" or DTO. So what I'm saying is, citing an article from 2005 where somebody made a similar set of observations/predictions about enterprise software does not invalidate or lessen the value of what somebody else said in 2007. Nobody owns ideas: they're often independently arrived it in parallel by widely dispersed groups, and can even disappear and reappear in a culture, in cycles, over time. Heck, the bookstore is full of books written or published in just 2010 where the authors share earth-shattering new secrets about love and life that arguably have been well-covered in tons of books that came out in past decades if not centuries and were even known as far back as that ancient uncivilized barbarian Will Shakespeare. But thanks for the link! :) Too much caffeine today.

dasil003 16y ago

That's a massively superior article, but what makes you think that Jason read that?

mpm 16y ago
A month earlier someone posted a link to the same email as a comment to a different 37signals post http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/define_enterprise_in_10_words_or_less.php#c9633 http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/define_enterprise_in_10_w...
- dasil003 16y ago
  oh snap!
- btilly 16y ago
  A link posted last month does not explain a 37 signals post from 2007. (Though I must say that it does seem very similar, and that email did get wide circulation.)
  - mpm 16y ago
    Not last month, a month earlier than the post in question. Check the timestamp.