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RE: The myth of 80/20

• To: 'Eric van der Vlist' <vdv@d...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: The myth of 80/20
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 10:23:02 -0600

It's easy to conceive of why 80/20 dominates given 
incomplete or ambiguous requirements and such.  Just 
remember that the alternative is to do all the work 
under one root, and in our world, that means a framework 
capable of subsuming all of the objects needed to 
paint that screen and keep updating it from data stores.
 
Avalon puts us squarely back in 1991 as designs go 
but in 2006 as hardware goes and into 2008 or later 
as market penetration, therefore customer use goes.  
Nothing new here but the timing is revealing as far 
as the application of 80/20.  One does it to keep 
one's visions from overworking the land and creating 
famine.

What Xanadu, Hytime, etc. left us were the ideas 
and concepts.  Pioneers clear land that farmers 
plant on.  That secures the future unless the farmers 
are also landgrabbers with faked claims and limited 
techniques such as slash and burn.  Otherwise, things 
work as they should.  Systems are built over past 
research as the environment can support them.

It is most useful to me to understand 80/20 as a 
limited objective, so a limited result and that is as 
good as the result is encapsulated.  It is when 
it has to scale or cope with other niches that the 
ecosystem begins to stress.  Stress creates  
churn.  Note that the patent wars would not be so 
attractive had open source not decided to make 
claims of driving costs to zero.  It's not cathedral 
and bazaar: it's Wal-Mart Vs MomAndPopGrocer and  
outsourcing vs SillyValley.  When the ecosystem churns, 
opportunities move elsewhere and then the fun begins 
because what was merely a technical fight among the 
geeks turns into a social problem for them.  Instead 
of a global village of peaceful trading, we will 
have Thunderdome.

Users in the z, operations in the y, data objects 
in the x.  It could be a fun map to plot in real time 
to watch the churning.  Let's see Google do that!

len


From: Eric van der Vlist [mailto:vdv@d...]

On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 15:27, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

> The web is a collection of working broken hacks. 
> That's the ultimate testament for 80/20 designs.

The ultimate testament for 80/20 designs is that 80% of the time the
80/20 is 80% subjective, caused by a lack of vision and/or a bad design
and just a poor excuse to refuse legitimate features!

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