I used to work among my software programmer colleagues, and I can tell you, it’s the same this in this field also.

Sometimes they’re just sooo in love with the technical challenge and the new technology, so they seem to completely forget what they actually need to solve !

This reminds of a article I read sometime ago in The New Yorker called Feature Presentation. The author proves that people would go for a feature-rich “complex” solutions anytime over the “simple and elegant” ones, simply because they’re hoping to get the maximum value for their money spent.

In essence this is similar to a mindset that is sometimes called “technological determinism”, where one automatically assumes that whatever is newer (or more technologically “advanced”) must therefore *necessarily* be better. The “simple elegant solutions” that may have worked in the past for hundreds of years must be rejected in favor of the latest-and-greatest because “newer = better”.

While newer certainly *may* be better, it is not *necessarily* better. It is most unfortunate that modern encomic growth, being rooted in the perpetuation of the process of (essentailly) selling more and more ‘things’ to more and more people, needs such a principle to provide an ethical grounding. While there are already 40 kinds of toothpaste on the shelves of my local Wallyworld, we need #41 because it is “new” and “improved”.

This mindset results in a misalignment of the balance between what we may refer to as CAN and SHOULD. The ‘newer-is-better’ mentality is a CAN|SHOULD (CAN over and above SHOULD) mindset that asks what CAN we do with all of our new technology, irregardless (for the most part) of if we SHOULD do it. The alternative is – surprise, surprise – SHOULD|CAN, where we first ask what we SHOULD be doing or if we SHOULD be doing something before we launch of into “newness for newness’ sake” or “technology for technologys’ sake”. There is a historical link here, with the SHOULD-dominant mentality having roots in the Medieval focus on WHY things happen, which was gradually replaced by the Enlightenment notion of a concern for HOW things happen, i.e. ‘HOW’ ‘CAN’ we make things happen, irregardless of WHY or SHOULD they happen.

In sum, the “simple elegant solutions” are most likely to be disregarded precisely because of their simplicity and elegance. How can a company sell a way of doing something that your great-great-grandmother did at the turn of the century, irrespective of how well it works?

BTW – Does Levi’s give you any trouble with your name?