It’s one word with an exclamation mark followed by a list of dated quotations from various sources running back through the past seven years. It’s the most on-point, refined, minimalistic yet communicative piece of writing I’ve seen. You don’t need to read it, you absorb the point by how long it takes to scroll through it to get to the punchline at the end. There isn’t one.
— Guy English "When The Boy Cries Wolf"
Turns out there was a punch line. There was a wolf eyeing the various flocks of sheep in the village. The boy — who was dismissed not because he cried wolf falsely before, but because other have commented about the possibility of wolf attacks over the years — gets not an apology from the head shepherder who accused him of fear mongering, or even thanks for trying to spur the wolf hunters to take up arms, but gets teased by him for not predicting accurately that wool would become the new luxury fashion three years ago.
Claim chowder is a lazy retort — it's easy to pretend to see all that has happened in the past as inevitable. It's much harder to extropolate tomorrow from today. Just ask John. He thought the wolf wouldn't show today. It didn't show yesterday, nor the day before, nor way back when he criticized Apple for handling the broken fence essentially the same way they handled it today.
Did John say that the Claim Chowder post was a response to the Mac Defender debate? It seems more likely that he found the article by chance and chose to post it rather than waiting.
As for the idea of hindsight and the "How I've spent my career getting it wrong" article, I think there's a very big difference between what the article was talking about and the Windows CE article Ed wrote. The article talks about getting things wrong when a source gives you information and then things change in the time between when you were told the information and when the product is released. What Ed did at the end of the article was speculation not based on information "But let’s come back in a year or two and see just how successful the platform really is."
Posted by: Pharoah6905 | 05/28/2011 at 09:38 PM