Rickerism

Engineers often become quite zealous over a new technology. “This will change the world!” they cry, “And replace all the other existing stuff!” The new technology may change a part of how the world does certain things (which is the engineer’s whole world, perhaps), but rarely if ever will replace the existing stuff.

To explain why a new technology will not replace the existing technologies, I use the metaphor of a pie.

Picture the technology market as a pie and each particular technology in the market is a slice of the pie. For instance, the technology market may be programming languages and the slices represent COBOL, C++, Java, etc. Each technology was created to address a certain shortcoming in the market. Where the boundaries of the slices meet, each technology sort of meets the needs, but not real well.

The technology pie is always growing

The pie is always growing larger because we are always solving more and more types of problems with technology. As the pie grows, the boundary between two particular slices becomes problematic. Eventually, the gap becomes significant enough that a new technology arises to solve the problem and becomes a new slice on the pie to fill that gap. Sometimes the new technology will even grow into areas poorly addressed by previous technology.

The essence of engineering is compromise. No single technology will perfectly meet the needs of every domain. No single technology will be valuable enough to replace all the other older technologies. As such, no new technology will ever completely cover the whole pie.

Look for the gaps. Look for evolution, not revolution.