Thursday, August 26, 2004
Small, but significant
This caught my eye:
Phil's comment intrigued me. How often is an idea derided as a trivial advance over existing methods, then we discover that the new idea has just the right combination of power and simplicity to hit the sweet spot? Before AltaVista hyped it, people thought of web search as trivial, a feature at best. Today search has become the primary web navigation experience.
For software creators, the lesson is that we shouldn't hold back from developing our products for fear that they won't "change the world": for all we know, they just might.
In the same way that searching on the Web is a small, but significant departure from Web-based directories, tuple-spaces are a small, but significant departure from message-based pub-sub systems.If you happen to be researching distributed computing, rush over to Linda and Service Oriented Architectures by Phil Windley and find out more about tuple-spaces.
Phil's comment intrigued me. How often is an idea derided as a trivial advance over existing methods, then we discover that the new idea has just the right combination of power and simplicity to hit the sweet spot? Before AltaVista hyped it, people thought of web search as trivial, a feature at best. Today search has become the primary web navigation experience.
For software creators, the lesson is that we shouldn't hold back from developing our products for fear that they won't "change the world": for all we know, they just might.
