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Showing posts from January, 2012

The difference between Black Swans, Flying Green Monkeys, and Unicorns

What is the difference between a Black Swan, a Flying Green Monkey, and a Unicorn? First off, a Black Swan is an unexpected event that is rationalized to be obvious in retrospect. It's based on theory elaborated in a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The most important distinction that Black Swans have apart from Flying Green Monkeys and Unicorns is that Black Swans actually exist whereas FGMs and Unicorns reasonably cannot. The term Flying Green Monkeys refer to a pessimists fantasy about a highly improbable event or situation that might happen. Often they are paranoid delusions based on partial or incorrect facts and the actual probability that something may happen. They are related to Black Swans in that they live in the land of chaos and the unexpected (extremestan in Taleb's terms) but they are distinctly different because they are seen as a negative catastrophic event that can be planned for. To use a traditional statis

All software is a commodity

If you have the right people.... I was looking at a small company's recent 10-Q filing and was struck that 1/2 of their total assets were in their proprietary software. Struck mostly because I could download 20 different solutions for free (or little charge) from the internet and completely replace all $40 million dollars of that software in a relatively short period of time (with the right people on the team ;). Listen folks, if you allow yourself to think that your craptastic custom software solution is one of your biggest strategic assets, you've been listening to too many salesmen from companies who's whole goal is to lock you into their proprietary platform. When a "Senior Architect" from a company that sells software comes to tell you that your software is a strategic asset, they are trying to sell you something. The software itself is almost without value, it's the process of developing the software and encoding/enforcing business knowledge that pr