I think about this often. It’s exceedingly rare that I’ll come across some solution to a problem that is the best of all available options. That’s generally f

I think about this often. It’s exceedingly rare that I’ll come across some solution to a problem that is the best of all available options. That’s generally fine in everyday life. You don’t need to be the best carpenter in the world, just the one that offers the best service at a fair price in your area. I don’t think we’ve really absorbed the fact that with software development, average solutions to problems have no justifiable reason to exist other than market inefficiency. A lot of ad hoc software I see that has had hundreds of thousands of pounds invested in it is ultimately a buggy, feature-depleted version of SquareSpace. And yet massive sums of money continue to be spent on un-necessary greenfield projects to reinvent one wheel or another. The UK government recently wasted unspeakable sums of money “developing” a track-and-trace app. The quotes are because it’s not clear what needed to be developed when essentially the track-and-trace API’s from Apple and Google boil down to slapping your local health service’s splash screen over the template and not much else. I do sort of suspect that over time, as search has become synonymous with Google and internet video has become synonymous with YouTube, that we’ll end up with a one-solution-to-supplant-them-all for almost every common use case. We’re not there yet, but we’re not far off either I’d wager. There are pros-and-cons to this. Microsoft had cornered the market on what people at the time perceived to be the most essential software in the 80’s and 90’s and those products are significantly less consequential today. Maybe we’ll operate in cycles of centralisation and decentralisation like we have with information networks. Eventually we’ll all just be replaced by AI anyway, so maybe it doesn’t even matter.