Rodent Regatta

There’s a discussion going on at Jason Kottke’s web site. He has asked, and others are pondering, criteria such as fast, cheap and good in any design effort. Conventional wisdom says you can have two, but not all three.

We see the selection of only two of these in every walk of life. We see it in politics. We see it in product compromises. We see people who make this trade-off decision every day of their lives.

Follow the discussion and you’ll learn two things. You’ll learn of examples where this logic is applied. You’ll also learn how quickly people are to accept that only two choices are available.

With the benefit of hindsight, there’s a more important question: has any product, service, project or effort fulfilled all three of these?