Tuesday, July 27, 2004

Scott Rosenberg comments on a striking claim in a recent NYT op-ed by Nicholas Carr: Software never decays? Carr is a Harvard Business Review veteran, and I assume he works with computer software every day, as most of us do -- but I can't imagine such a sentence being written by anyone who uses a personal computer or runs a software-dependent business (which means virtually any business today) for any extended period of time. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] When I read Carr's piece I thought of blogging my similar reaction, but I let it go. I agree with Rosenberg's points, but I think he is too gentle when he says that Carr may be technically correct but pragmatically wrong. In any interesting sense of "technical", Carr is technically wrong.Software is designed to meet given goals in a specific environment. But goals change and so does the environment. Even if the original implementation were correct relative to the initial goals and environment, that wouldn't tell us much about the present goals and environment. Even automatic adaptation and learning, as touted in IBM's autonomic computing, leaves out a critical question: how does long-running software adjust itself to changing goals? Evolutionary analogies are of no use here, because designs for living things are selected by survival, not by externally specified goals. If for nothing else, long-lived software needs people in the middle to mold it to changing goals. 3:25:42 PM

There is so much out there rotting unpublished in vaults and distribution on the Internet would be very practical (if they could figure out licensing and union rules). It was sad. [tingilinde] Unfortunately, groups whose fortunes are declining are often the least able to take the long view and stop fighting over crumbs. As the Portuguese saying goes (my translation): "In a home without bread, everyone fights and no one is right." I'm convinced that there are many of us who would connect more to alternative music sources and distribution channels if they were not so encumbered. My perennial example is Vin Scelsa's "Idiot's Delight", which was causing me to buy different music from classical to Mali pop until new licensing restrictions forced him to stop his weekly webcast. 1:44:08 PM