When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending…
  • perishthethought@lemm.eeEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    I read the whole thing, wondered why the technologies mentioned were so old, then noticed he wrote this in 2001.

    It all bears repeating, I guess.

  • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    His ire is misplaced. He blames braindead marketing copy on technical architects instead of marketers and businessmen.

    He acts like the problem of buzzwords comes from the initial legitimate use of the word, and not the subsequent clueless co-opting and bandwagoning. “Peer-to-peer file transfer” is a real, legitimate, and very important thing. “Peer-to-peer venture capital funds” is not. It’s not software architects pushing that hogwash; it’s some finance schmuck who’s probably on cocaine.

    If Napster wasn’t peer-to-peer but it did let you type the name of a song and then listen to it, it would have been just as popular

    This is a shallow take. If Napster wasn’t peer-to-peer, it would have been useless and would not have functioned. These “abstractions” are required if you don’t want every average Joe with an idea to need to reinvent the wheel. Sure, you could come up with a different system to accomplish the same goal, but then you’d be the architecture astronaut.

    As for Dot Net, Java, etc., yes, the marketing copy is exhaustingly meaningless. But these are developer tools; the point is not to solve problems users have; the point is to give developers better tools to solve those problems.