Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dijit 1994 days ago
I think there should be a new computer science law (if this one doesn't exist already):

Things that are easy to migrate from get replaced by things that are hard to migrate from, eventually.

IRC is incredibly easy to migrate from.

2 comments

IRC is easy to migrate from since there is nothing to migrate other then chat history. IRC is also missing so many features that slack provides out the box. And a law like that would not work since you would need to write complicated transformation scripts to transform between services. Also not all services are a 1-1 mapping. I like IRC but it has its limitations. That is why slack succeeded where IRC did not.
> And a law like that would not work

The parent meant a law as in "a law of physics", not a piece of legislation.

We can call it the "Law Of Lotus Notes". I'm not sure if it's hard to migrate from, I can only assume that it is impossible to migrate from.