Friday, February 11, 2005 6:35 PM
jcmaslan
Chipping away at the "Tyranny of the OR"
It's pretty natural to think through engineering problems in terms of choices between this OR that (e.g. web app OR windows app, online OR offline, centralized OR distributed, record-oriented OR document-oriented, synchronous OR asynchronous, http OR tcp, etc.). I've been calling this the "tyranny of the OR" - when our customers want us to think in terms of "AND".
That's why I like Soma's VSLive Keynote demo on Smart Clients (demo itself starts at 40:17 in the video). It's an example of "AND" thinking - a spectrum of end user experiences enabled by a pragmatic blend of ASP.NET, WinForms, Compact Framework, SQL Server, and Office.