No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering is a widely discussed paper on software engineering written by Fred Brooks in 1986. Brooks argues that “there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.” He also states that “we cannot expect ever to see two-fold gains every two years” in software development, like there is in hardware development.

Brooks makes a distinction between accidental complexity and essential complexity, and asserts that most of what software engineers now do is devoted to the essential, so shrinking all the accidental activities to zero will not give an order-of-magnitude improvement. Brooks advocates addressing the essential parts of the software process. While Brooks insists that there is no one silver bullet, he believes that a series of innovations attacking essential complexity could lead to significant (perhaps greater than tenfold in a ten-year period)

To get a better understanding, Bob Metcalf added that:

In today’s discussions of energy you will hear about various SILVER BULLETS, including various forms of taxation, mitigation, sequestration, gasification, biofuels, nuclear, photosynthesis, photovoltaics, and hydrogen. And you will hear somebody wisely say there really are no silver bullets. I disagree.

My silver bullet is FOCACA, an acronym short for Freedom Of Choice Among Competing Alternatives. If it’s progress you want, rely on FOCACA — in politics, where it’s called democracy, in economics, where it’s called free markets, in culture, in religion, and in the technological innovation of clusters. I learned this watching the Internet evolve and proliferate.

To follow the logic of the need for a paradigm shift, I suggest readers to take a look at the EWPC article “Strong Evidence of Why Utilities as We Know Them Will Fail,” at the address http://bit.ly/x88IH

What I read from this article is “I’m a VC, please don’t compete with the company I have put my money into, but please do provide a piece of the puzzle we need, so I don’t have to invest more.”

That’s not to say that Adam Grosser isn’t credible however, he is.

Smart Grid is just getting going, and innovation is supposed to stop? If innovation of the internet stopped, we wouldn’t have the great sites that we have, and depend on, today. And there wasn’t, and isn’t, only one company making servers, or server solutions. Furthermore, the DoE standards list was only just ratified in May.

Katie, you just reported in June via Reuters that Smart Grid wasn’t a bubble seen here:

http://www.reuters.com/article/earth2Tech/idUS30745889220090622

are we to expect that in two months you’ll report, via word from another VC, that management software is over invested too?

I think we have a long road ahead of us. Innovation is key, and not a burden.

FOCACA is missing because the Smart Grid is one incremental extension of the obsolete Investor Owned Utilities Architecture Framework that leads to one regulated architecture Smart Grid business model. To get FOCACA there is a need to make a paradigm shift to the Electricity Without Price Controls Architecture Framework, which leads to the Silicon Valley Model business model architecture competition.

As long as people are “familiar” in a general way with “something they can easily understand” ( oh the sins under the words of that phrase!) they will be caught dumbfounded when it —the same process gives the same results as ever.

To paraphrase:

Oh show me the way to the next market bubble
Oh don’t ask me why.
For if I don’t find the next market bubble
Then surely I will Die!

Let’s just hope the “smart” grid is true enough to the name not to go down with it when it comes and bursts!