The Least Common of the Senses in Computing

If you forgive me the obviousness, you may have already heard that somewhere else that “common sense is the least common of all senses”. As far as popular wisdom goes, this saying is usually right; but there are two special corollaries:

  1. Proposition is specially true in all commercial/business environments; and
  2. Proposition is uniquely true in regards to computing.

I don’t have anything to add now to corollary 1. Why is that common sense is so rare in business? Why is that all kinds of weird nonsense gets respect as “business plans” in the corporate world? I don’t know. Maybe because, as some have pointed out, the skills required by the corporate world border on sociopathy. But I do not want to discuss this, at least not now.

The other corollary, however, deserves some attention. Computing is supposedly an area where the best and brightest would reign, and, therefore, the choices made by IT people would be the best ones given the circumstances, right? Yeah, right. The prevalence of Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer alone belies that.

Therefore, I am planning some posts (at least two) where I would like to examine how current choices in computing defy common sense and, therefore, are paving the way for failure, or for more difficulties. And no, I won’t talk necessarily about Windows or IE; that would be just too obvious. I plan to talk about two issues that are the current fad or are being part of it:

  • Cloud computing
  • System resources

Stay tuned!

3 Comments

  1. Regarding both applications of the proposition, it’s caused by dehumanizing. Reducing people to mere resources is what makes senseless. Particularly in computing, forgetting computers are utterly senseless unless they serve real human need is the root of all sorts of silliness. Making a god of “pure computing” is deadly.

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