I’ve now lived through like 4-5 tech cycles accompanied by “but what is the use of X?” and “old Y can do what new X does and more, and better” conversations.
Sheer waste of time.
It never matters. X will do what X will do.
X and Y people rarely learn anything from the debate.
Conversation
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I’ve lived through a similar number. I’ve found that Xes which can adequately answer that question succeed and survive and Xes which don’t, don’t.
It’s the definition of success. Plenty of highly visible tech failed to answer the question and quietly died.
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For example, do you remember “Complex Event Processing”? Probably not.
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Equally, many technologies that *do* answer those questions in seemingly reasonable ways fail too. I found Google Wave’s answers to be very persuasive. It didn’t matter. It failed for reasons outside those conversations that only became apparent with hindsight.
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Yeah, that’s what I meant by necessary but not sufficient, though I tweeted that after you tweeted this.

