Creative Deletion

Welcome to my new weblog: Creative Deletion. I expect to write about technology and business. Does the name sound a bit odd? I was inspired by the concept of creative destruction. The process of new, better solutions replacing the old is very interesting to me. The sum of many improvements - big or small - can have a substantial impact on people’s lives. This gradual economic development is what makes the average person of today¹ richer in many ways than a king of a few hundred years ago.

Technology is something I also find very interesting. Partly because technology is valuable to people - if it isn’t valuable to people, what’s the point?

An example of creative destruction in technology is the floppy disk. New technology that lead to bigger files and new ways to transfer and store data, such as the Internet, USB flash drives, writable optical media etc., has absolutely destroyed the market for floppy disks. And it’s actually a good thing that resources aren’t put into production and distribution of floppy disks anymore. Destruction like that can be positive. And it happens “automatically” in market economies. The floppy factories are closed or converted to something else. The retailer uses the storage space where the floppies used to be for other products - or closes the shop and makes way for online shopping.

So both business and technology interest me, and so does the intersection of the two. Delivering value to people is something that marketing and usability has in common. And just like a product should be shaped for the customer, a computer interface should be shaped for the user. I consider business and product development as a an activity that is just as creative as developing computer software or anything else.

In addition to writing about business and technology in general terms, I expect to write about some very concrete technology and source code. Mainly Ruby.