Over a year ago I unsubscribed fromSteve‘s blog because he had a habit of writing in breathless fashion about the latest shiny new thing – often several times a day. I see too many people I know getting caught up in the breathless hype and forgetting to think about whether the latest shiny new thing really matters in the grand scheme of things.

[Robert Scoble] says that he gets too much email and that is ineffective for getting PR releases to him. He suggests that what you should do now is leave him a message on his Facebook wall. Dear god and/or Bob. In the time I‘ve followed Scoble, I must have seen something like this a dozen times from him. Don‘t email, Twitter me. Don‘t Twitter, Pwnce. Jaiku me. Leave a wall message, send an SMS, just call me, email me, don‘t email me, don‘t call me. Enough already! I‘m not even trying to get in contact with him, and I find this constant migration from platform to platform to be a load of shit that just wearies me. I felt the same way when I dropped TechCrunch, well over a year ago. I got so tired of hearing about another slightly different way of doing what we were already doing and why that tiny difference was worth dropping everything and moving over. I officially renounce the search for the newer and shinier.

　　Users don‘t care whether you use J2EE, Cobol, or a pair of magic rocks. They want their credit card authorization to process correctly and their inventory reports to print. You help them discover what they really need and jointly imagine a system.

　　Instead of getting carried away with the difficult race up the cutting edge of the latest technology, Pete concentrated on building a system [in COBOL] that works for him and his clients. It‘s simple, perhaps almost primitive by our lofty standards. But it‘s easy to use, easy to understand, and fast to deploy. Pete‘s framework uses a mixture of technologies: some modeling, some code generation, some reusable components, and so on. He applies the fundamental pragmatic principle and uses what works, not what‘s merely new or fashionable.

　　We fail (as an industry) when we try to come up with the all-singing, all-dancing applications framework to end all applications frameworks.Maybe that‘s because there is no grand, unified theory waiting to emerge. One of the hallmarks of postmodernism – which some think is a distinguishing feature of our times – is that there‘s no "grand narrative," no overarching story to guide us. Instead, there are lots of little stories.