[sf-perl] SanFrancisco-pm Digest, Vol 39, Issue 2

Andy Lester andy at petdance.com
Thu Apr 3 13:11:20 PDT 2008


On Apr 3, 2008, at 2:09 PM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> Growing an Internet
> community is hard and not always successful, and often has an  
> unexpected
> outcome.


And that "unexpected outcome" is exactly the point.  None of us can  
predict the success or failure of any given venture.  Who would have  
expected these?

* A little framework called Rails would catapult Ruby into the public  
eye
* WWW::Mechanize is popular, but WWW::Automate was not
* AltaVista, the gold standard of search engines, would disappear from  
the public mind
* A little book shipper called Amazon would grow so popular
* Orkut would be so huge, and so quickly fall to Myspace and Facebook  
and other social networks
* The Apple Lisa would be a dismal failure, but enabled the Macintosh.

Look even on a smaller scale.  Who got Rickrolled on Tuesday?  Who  
could have predicted even the concept of Rickrolling a year ago? "Hey,  
dig this.  I'm going to create this meme (in the real sense of the  
word) where people post links to a Rick Astley video as a joke."   
Absolutely absurd.

There's only so much you can plan for.  The entire concept of agile  
programming is based on the idea that you cannot plan for everything  
that's going to happen, so bias yourself toward action, to making  
things happen, to leapfrogging the status quo.

xoxo,
Andy

--
Andy Lester => andy at petdance.com => www.petdance.com => AIM:petdance






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