In tech, quantity has a quality all its own

Just before a technology becomes popularized, there’s a predictable reaction from insiders. When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, hypertext and markup experts decried the immature capabilities of HTML and its links. When I first heard of Linux, my Solaris-using colleagues were quick to think it dangerous and sloppy. And when big data became a thing, the data warehouse tribe disparaged its half-assed support for everything they knew to be an enterprise need.

These folk were right—half-assing it is not a great indicator of success—and yet they were wrong too. It’s a repeating trend every time, memorably characterized in programmer lore as “worse is better.” That is, a more accessible technology beats out the more complete one. The end result is massively increased adoption, and a change in the technology landscape.

One of the exciting—and scary—things is that you don’t actually know what kind of change you’re going to get when mass adoption happens. The Web enabled the socially and commercially connected world, smartphones, streaming TV. Linux enabled the scale-out servers that drove the web’s expansion, and made big data possible. It’s hard to imagine Tim Berners-Lee or Linus Torvalds envisaging those consequences.

So we come to find that, as they say in the military, quantity has a quality all its own. Any time something gets out of the hands of the few and is made available to the many, change is bound to happen.

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