Joel "Nostradamus" Spolsky in 2001: > Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like “Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music” and i

Joel "Nostradamus" Spolsky in 2001: > Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like “Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music” and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it’s interesting because it’s peer to peer, completely missing the point that it’s interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away. > All they’ll talk about is peer-to-peer this, that, and the other thing. Suddenly you have peer-to-peer conferences, peer-to-peer venture capital funds, and even peer-to-peer backlash with the imbecile business journalists dripping with glee as they copy each other’s stories: “Peer To Peer: Dead!” > The Architecture Astronauts will say things like: “Can you imagine a program like Napster where you can download anything, not just songs?” Then they’ll build applications like Groove that they think are more general than Napster, but which seem to have neglected that wee little feature that lets you type the name of a song and then listen to it — the feature we wanted in the first place. Talk about missing the point. If Napster wasn’t peer-to-peer but it did let you type the name of a song and then listen to it, it would have been just as popular. I've thought about that essay a lot in the past couple of years. For all of the merits of ＢＬＯＣＫＣＨＡＩＮ I never found it very useful for conducting transactions. Sure, that's the machinations of the federal deep state lizard illuminati, but also it always felt like architecture and ideology were the point, and serving an actual need was an afterthought.