True story: I had a one-slide internal presentation I made at Moz, that read "people will say and do and believe literally any crazy bullshit if the only alternative they can see is to feel powerless over something they care about."
One keenly-felt personal failure of my time there was that l could never convince the org that this is not just a truth, but a strategy. So now, people who care a lot about Mozilla have been made to feel powerless a lot in the last decade.
I have a suspicion that idea of "surprise and delight" has poisoned the world of technical comms, especially when it comes to "products" that people depend on, especially when it comes to the infrastructure of people's lives.
There's no world where anyone is delighted if their plumbing, or oven, or cane or wheelchair or elevator or blender or brakes or or or surprises them. None. Consistency and reliability is everything.
The failure mode of "surprise and delight" is "startled and terrified."
I have, but I think that software covers such a span of utility that it's not the right analogy. The tool definitely has room to evolve and improve, but the bedrock principles under it don't have the same degree of freedom.
@wlonk @mhoye I was not familiar and don't quite understand how that maps on here. Is the idea that plumbing, ovens, elevators are "commodities" in the sense of that "the market treats their instances as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them", whereas (some) software artifacts are "products", meaning "Non-commodity items", in the sense that they have "many aspects of product differentiation, such as the brand, the user interface and the perceived quality"? And does "commoditization curve" refer to what "occurs as a goods or services market loses differentiation across its supply base, often by the diffusion of the intellectual capital necessary to acquire or produce it efficiently"? (quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity)
Is the upshot of what you're suggesting that much software is still being treated as a product when it should have transitioned into a commodity by now? Or somehow the opposite?
@wlonk IIUC @mhoye 's point (which really resonates with me), a core problem here is the attempt to productize infrastructure.
Given that,
> In general, infrastructure has been defined as "the physical components of interrelated systems providing commodities and services essential to enable, sustain, or enhance societal living conditions" and maintain the surrounding environment. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure)
The attempt to commoditize or productize infrastructure confuses the order of things and the function of infra, since infra is a condition of possibility for the availability of commodities and the production of products. The productization of infra seems directly counter what a rational socio-economic order would pursue, afaiu, which is rather (as much as possible) the infrastructuralization of commodities: i.e., taking things from manual toil, to supply limited exchange (e.g., via markets), and finally offering them as effectively guaranteed and on demand.
mhoye
kit 🌬️🌦️
Shon
