Great post by James Bennet reviewing the tool wars having to do with a certain web dev. thing that ends in “ails”.
It had been developed by a young Dutch carpenter who worked at a small shop in Seattle. In order to compete in the crowded Seattle carpentry market, his shop needed to develop a serious advantage, and The Hammer was that advantage. They made headlines all around the carpentry world by having their four-man team build an entire house in just a few weeks.
What’s more, The Hammer was infamously hard to adapt for multi-national environments where the nails didn’t all conform to the shapes and sizes common in its country of origin. There was a well-known world-wide standard — Unipound — which had been developed to deal with internationalized carpentry, but The Hammer couldn’t be made to take advantage of that.
(I know a lot of readers will have no idea what that’s about.)