[BobWarfield]

This article assumes all knowledge is equally valuable, equally hard to gain, and decays at the same rate, but none of that is true.

Frameworks change constantly, computer languages less frequently, and architectural notions much less frequently. Yet the value and difficulty of learning is exactly reversed.

The nature of the media that defines the marketing strategy changes relatively slowly compared to tech. Successful business strategies change still slower than the marketing, and the actual behavior of people much more slowly.

Most of the facts that are changing the fastest are very cheap to "re-discover". So cheap that there is a term for it: the Google Effect.

I can't see any particularly good lessons for startups from the article as a result.

[chipsy]

The way I would put it is: most of the things we call "wisdom" are more like "fashion." It's fashionable to be "in the cloud." It's fashionable to "fail fast." And so on. These are cyclical attributes; one can always find, at the least, an anecdotal situation which demonstrates or disproves their worth. And over a period of time - one year, five years, 30 years - the fashion runs its course, gets replaced by something else, and then gets revived again.

And - the other part of this is - tech businesses, and consequently tech employees, are entirely reliant on staying within the fashion to make their money. Any single product you push out today has a good chance of devaluing within a few years, if the industry as a whole moves on. And so, over and over, part of the fashion cycle is the monopoly play - every company races to monopolize and lock in its users so that it can break through the fashion cycle, sit on the product with old tech, and maximize extraction. But then, some time later, it gets disrupted by a startup, which then proceeds to lock in its users...

Triple-O strategies (open standard, open source, open development) seem to break the fashion cycle in software over the very long-term and force business to move to new categories(a good thing for the global economy, especially with software demand being ever-increasing). This is especially true when an open solution can break out of the "back office" and improve its UX. But one of the big, largely unanswered questions is whether businesses can be given economic incentives to remain open, and whether this phenomenon can escape software and move into hardware.

[Shorel]

Sorry to disagree, but I don't think we are going back to seriously think the earth is the center of the universe and it is flat.

[aurelianito]

I do. Did anyone told you about creationism?

[aurelianito]

To modders out there: Do you find my observation offensive in some way? Why is it modded down?

[Shorel]

To me is the other way around.

The article assumes that we don't know when any particular piece of knowledge will experiment decay and we can't know until after the fact, just as it would happen with a particular atom in the physics half-life.

The lesson is of course to never assume any current practice is the end-of-all-arguments that never should be contested. Have an open mind for everything.

[jackaltman]

this is exactly the point -- startup best-practices change much more rapidly than best-practices for something like bridge construction.