The tech space is one of the fastest growing and changing of all the spaces. The amount of innovation and courage in this industry is awe-inspiring to say the least. Staying on top of it has always been a challenge but it seems that the pace is not just increasing steadily – it’s accelerating.
Don’t get me wrong, overall, I think this is a good thing – technology enriches lives in so many ways and the more people are exposed to it the better. The difficulty is that with so much choice, a couple of issues arise:
- Analysis paralysis – there are so many things to think about and consider that it slows or even prevents the adoption of particular technology
- It’s a more complex space – it’s difficult to know where to begin or where to stop when so many products and services cover so many things, often with overlap
- Increases the barrier of entry – as a result of the above a lot of people would just rather not bother or get overwhelmed quickly because it all looks too hard
- Feature creep – with increasing competition and demands from people, the products themselves become increasingly complex (case in point, iTunes)
- More products are created to simplify the now complex ones (that’s the unbundling of Excel)
- …and on and on and back around we go…
So what can we do about this?
One realisation I’ve come to is that a lot of popular systems are good enough. So a good solution is to start with something popular and stick with it for a good amount of time. If it ends up doing everything that you need, that’s great, otherwise I just move on to the next popular thing. This strategy works because it gets your foot in the door, lots of help is available and mastering one thing will make it easier to pick up the next thing.
Of course there are numerous other strategies but in the spirit of keeping things simple (and without getting too meta!) that’s all I will mention. The strategy is good enough and its worked well for me so far but I will probably shake things up in time.