‘Flying Car Syndrome - The Book’ Archive

Garden of Eden Fallacy

From the upcoming e-book, Flying Car Syndrome

You may come across the view from clients that “Facebook is just like living in a small town”, or Twitter is “like overhearing people in a crowded subway car”.    These people are suffering from the Garden of Eden fallacy; which is thinking that some new technology is recreating something that existed in the past, only updated for the modern world.  In fact the the new technology and the old situation have little in common.  They might have a similar function, like keeping in touch for FaceBook, but the fallacy gets problematic when people inflict other attributes of the old situation onto the new technology.

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Flying Car Syndrome

This is will most likely be included in some form in my upcoming e-book.

Flying Car Syndrome

Imagine the following exchange one week after a car sale:

Salesman: So, how do you like the new Prius?

Prius Buyer: It’s a piece of crap, I’m never buying a hybrid again.  You lied to me!

Salesman: What do you mean?  Aren’t you getting great mileage?

Prius Buyer: Mileage?  Who cares about mileage, it doesn’t fly!

Salesman: WTF?  Who told you cars could fly?

Prius Buyer: Of course hybrid cars can fly, why else would they be called hybrids?  And I saw a flying car in a movie once.

Now imagine talking to a client after a site has launched.  He came to you ignorant of the technology but specific in his requirements.  He wanted a site that mirrors the designer’s Photoshop files, standards compliant CSS and XHTML,  written in ASP.net MVC, optimized for 1280 by 920 screen resolutions and complete by the end of the month.  You do all those things, and wow, the site looks awesome – just like the Photoshop files, standards compliant,  and delivered on time.  If you’re dealing with Flying Car Syndrome, the call sounds something like this: Read more on Flying Car Syndrome…

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