Tuesday, January 07, 2014

The Law of 2.1 or Downsie's Law

We've all heard or Moore's Law and Murphy's Law, well I'd like to introduce my own piece of wisdom, Downsie's Law, otherwise known as the law of 2.1.

This comes out of many, many years of experience in the computer industry and being subject to the whims and commercial drivers of that business.

The law refers to the observation that versions 2.1 of anything is almost universally good, and are the ones that you should stick with.

The premise goes something like this. A developer comes up with a great idea and gets to a 1.0 release.

1.0 is a great idea and a good product. However, it hasn't been fully road tested and feedback gathered etc. So it is limited and it's limitations are soon identified. With any luck there will be a number of 1.n iterations where the product gets better and better each time, but because it is based on 1.0 code there are limits to what can be done.

2.0 is the next major release, and it's fantastic. All the problems with 1.n have been resolved, the underlying codebase has been overhauled to make better able to do the things you want it to. The rough edges have been smoothed off, developers have listened and it is a great, fully functional product. You love it. But, and there's always a but with point zero releases, it has bugs.

Of course it has bugs, the developers wanted to get all the goodies in there and they were pushed for a release date - they don't want to disappoint their customers and they have crammed they can into the release.

Sometime after comes the 2.1 release which has all the goodness of 2.0 with added stability and robustness. And it's fantastic, as the saying goes, this one's a keeper.

After that, things generally go downhill, the code gets bloated, features get added that only appeal to a small percentage of the users, release cycles get set in stone and management start making the decisions on direction and everything gets more complex, complicated and slow. After time you start thinking wistfully about how good 2.1 was and how your life was better before version 3.




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