Steve’s Software Trek

Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote “Parkinson’s Law, and Other Studies in Administration” that was published in October, 1962.

There is an example in the book that refers to a bike shed and an atomic power-plant. According to a posting on the freebsd mailing list,

Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions.

Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far.

A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is *here*.

I heard this color of the bikeshed analogy for the first time while watching a Google Video titled, “How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too).” The video contains a lot of good tips for open source projects and for communities in general. Paul posted a nice summary of the points in the video.

I read an article in Wired magazine in February, 2006. It was an article about GM and hybrids and fuel cells. GM planned to go directly from gasoline engines to fuel cell engines, skipping the hybrids. I think that their philosophy applies to lots of engineering problems, and a quote from auto industry consultant Maryann Keller defines what I mean:

What technology doesn’t become cheaper and easier to build over time? The personal computer weighed 50 pounds in the early 1980s. Hybrids are complex and expensive, but you’ll never figure out how to make them better and cheaper until you put the technology in real-world cars. I say, ‘Why wait? What do you have to sell me today?’

If you have enough capital to sustain you, why not leapfrog the technology and put advanced technology into real-world products?