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January 03, 2006
The two caves
Imagine a genie appears before you, and offers you two choices:
A: You will be given the location and password to a secret cave. Inside that cave is a fountain that pours out molten gold. Each month, you can enter the cave, and place a bucket into the basin under the fountain, and collect a bucketfull of gold. But beware! If anyone else should learn about this fountain, they too will be able to take a bucket to the fountain, and scoop out a bucketfull of gold.
B: You will be given the location and password to a secret cave, just like the first. But in this cave, each person who you share the secret of the cave with increases the flow of the gold into the basin, effectively increasing the flow by 101%
Which would you choose? After some thought, I would guess that most people would choose B, because they wouldn't have to live with the constant fear that someone else might find the cave, and tell the world about it. They wouldn't have to build elaborate systems and defenses, to prevent anyone from coming close to finding the cave. In fact, it would be in their best interest to make sure everyone knew about the cave, because each new person would not only receive a fair share, but effectively increase your share as well.
Right now, in software development, I suspect that many, if not most software developers in the US believe we are all living in cave A. Many of us are deathly afraid that as Indian and Chinese and European and Indonesian developers enter the market, that the fountain will become crowded with people who are taking our gold.
But I believe that we are in cave B. That, far from decreasing the flow of gold, the larger number of developers increases it. Because now more software projects are profitable. More ideas can be turned into reality at lower cost. More educated brains are thinking about software development, and how to make it easier. And, more importantly, IT is the single largest cause of productivity gains in the economy. Productivity gains == lower prices, more selection, more disposable income, more opportunities to pursue new ideas, and new business. And inevitably in this modern, Internet-based world, those ideas require software. Lots and lots of software. Which increases productivity, which further reduce costs and prices, which frees up more money.
Right now, the world's challenge isn't that there is a limited number of good ideas. The challenge is that there is a limited number of people (engineers) who can implement the ideas. But the wonderful side effect of educating more engineers is that it creates new ideas!
We are living in a golden age. Most of us just don't know it yet.
Posted by jb at January 3, 2006 09:46 AM
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