[dang]

I hate buzzwordy articles (and chatbox popups) too, but this article is better than usual and I think the point is a good one. There are situations in which you can't win at the old game, but if you reframe what you're doing as a new game, you can turn yourself into an early defining player instead of a hapless latecomer.

We see this in technical domains too. For example, I think Clojure succeeded this way. (We can argue about how much Clojure has succeeded, but it's a Lisp—we have to grade on a curve.) I don't think any attempt at improving on Common Lisp, no matter how technically solid, could have achieved that without "naming a new game", to use the article's vocabulary. Hot newness dominates improved oldness: every element of the set of hot newness beats every element of the set of improved oldness. Elixir/Erlang is another example. I say this article is one of the rarest things, a piece of marketing literature (like Crossing the Chasm and maybe the Innovator's Dilemma) that is useful to engineers.

[_bxg1]

It came across to me as "Just use this one weird trick and you can convince people of anything!" The runner example in particular seemed to emphasize the convincing over the content. I suppose it's possible to use the same technique benevolently, but the article didn't seem concerned with that question.

[brlewis]

Engineers' emphasis on content over convincing is why we often fail to persuade. I think dang is right that this is a piece of marketing literature that's useful to engineers.