Comment by hinkley

Part of the reason I’m so… enthusiastic… about tech debt is that I’ve worked a few times where we had a competitor whose lunch we were stealing or who was stealing ours and the ability or inability to copy features cheaply was substantially the difference between us.

That quad graph of value versus difficulty that everyone loves? It’s not quadrants it’s a gradient and the difficulty dimension depends quite a bit on context. What’s a 4 difficulty for me might be a 6 for someone else. Accidental versus intrinsic complexity plus similarity to or distinctions from things we have already done.