I find a lot of interesting parallels in technology and other disciplines when reading articles on the internet. It seems there is a lot of information and experiences that can be shared between people that create things. I recently started reading an interesting blog maintained by Seth Godin: Seth's Blog. The first post I read titled "the first piece of tape" is a short post, as most of Seth's are, and it introduces an analogy I have been thinking about a lot. In the post, Seth tells a quick story of a couch in the lobby of a theater. The couch was repaired with some black tape and Seth wonders about the first person that decided tape was the route to go and why they didn't get the couch repaired "correctly". I shared the post with a few people and got a few different perspectives on the analogy.

fix broken windows

As often does in technology, the broken window theory came up as an interpretation of this post. The general theory goes that if there are signs of crime or deterioration in an area, people will be less likely to hesitate before making it worse. Crime and decay breeds crime and decay. In the world of technology a quick and dirty solution might lead to other quick and dirty solutions, leading to poor architectural choices and hard times later on when you realize you have to undo all these fixes.

pay attention to cost

This one was interesting. Instead of arguing that tape was not the proper way to fix the couch, maybe we need to see if the cost was too high to justify doing something else. Maybe the process of acquiring a new couch, and the cost of the couch, were too expensive to make it worth while. Or maybe replacing the couch was not a priority. Either way there is a possibility that tape was the best way to fix the problem at hand, given the constraints.

don't make choices in a silo

Ignoring some of the supposition in the post, I came to a different conclusion. This post reminded me of the lesson of not developing solutions in a silo. As Seth said, someone decided that tape was good enough to solve this issue. For me though, the bigger issue is that someone chose tape as the new technology to repair the couch. Going forward, unless someone decides to replace the couch or chose a new repair technology, people will have to continue to repair the couch using tape. These people may not have been in on the idea to use tape in the first place, but they will likely go along with it now that its "always been like that". Does anyone know why we've developed this new dependency on tape? Likely not. But going forward we need to make sure we always have some on hand.