Hey Dan

Freeman J Dyson an English-born American physicist and mathematician said the most amazing thing to me once. He said “If you build a specific tool you will find it is useful for many things. Build a general tool and you will find it is not good at any one thing.”

Let me start by telling you I am not a close friend of this or any theoretical physicist. It is not that I dislike them, I actually really enjoy listening to them. We just do not tend to go to the same type of parties you see. But while I was attending TCU as a Computer Science student I was fortunate enough to listen to a talk he gave. It changed my view of the world of computers and other tools. The talk was about the 8 most useful things ever invented. One of which was the computer. The subject of the Superconducting Super Collider project came up, the project that was cancelled in the mid 90’s. He said he was not sure if we should build it or not. You see it was designed as a general machine.

General machine do not work as well as specific ones. Let take the knife as an example, a good kitchen knife is a very useful thing. You can use it for cutting food for long periods of time comfortably and if you are like me you have used them to open boxes, smash garlic, and even pound a nail every once in a while. A Swiss Army knife on the other hand is a general tool. It does nothing really well. You can use it to do what a knife, corkscrew, or saw would do but not as well.

In the computer world the same rule is true. Remember the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) it was going to be everyone left hand. You were going to write email, organize contacts, plan events and do everything you do on your computer. Sales of the PDA have sunk. Most companies are not shipping them to the US anymore. The reason was that the PDA did not do anything really well. Smart cell phones have taken over the role the PDA was going to fill. For those of you, who might say the smart cell phone is a PDA, think about where they are sold, in a PDA store? No.

Since that talk with Dr Dyson, I have become a fan of specific machines. As a biologist I know that animals that adapt survive. But, animals that find a niche as adapt to fill it do better then ones that try to compete in a general environment. Think about it.