Wizards vs. Goblins

In a parallel universe the world is ruled by bit magic. The bit-magic flies around everywhere, it is used by peons to supervise their crops, by dwarves to control their mining rigs. There is for sure no place where the bit-magic cannot be found.

However the bit-magic is hard to capture, only some gifted characters can do it. They can catch the bit-magic and weave it in forms that are usable by peons, dwarves or other races.

The wizards live in high ivory towers, they are old and wise. They have endless scrolls written in elves languages that describe fantastic bit-magic weaving. Their magic is elegant, the shapes are pure, almost mathematically described, everything is formalized in higher level language that describe the meta-magic and the concrete magical creations are generating by casting the streams of meta magic into bit-magic generating crystals. The wizards communicate through owls that fly between the towers, carrying asynchronous messages in a decoupled temporally and spatially network. The wizards meet once every one thousand years and they discuss the completeness of the meta-magic and the crystalline structure optimizations for producing higher quality bit-magic. Those meetings are often a month long and they fight often because the elves languages they use are not always the same and they interpret words differently or disagree on the hierarchies. All the beautiful tools created by the wizards are updated once a millennium hence they have the aura of antiquities and people put high value on them although sometimes they are useless or utterly outdated.

The goblins on the other hand have simple ways of weaving the bit-magic. They write them down in the simplest form so that they all can read it. They go to the peasants and for small amounts of money they cast the bit-magic. Not always the best magic, but always workable. Everyone can use the products of their spell albeit they are sometimes cumbersome. When they see problems that they cannot solve immediately, they gather in their underworld caves and refine the spell so that they can always deliver a better version next day. Again goblin's aesthetics is not comparable with the intricate embroideries that the wizards put into their bit-magic spell but seems to be more reliable. Goblins seem to get along pretty well with each-other as they care about the global well-being of the goblin nation and they understand that every bit of magic they sell is for their collective well-being.

On this imaginary world whom would be the long time winner? The almost eternal wizards or the myriad of goblin generations? Whom would ultimately produce the best bit-magic?

The answer for this is simple - the survival will be dictated by the market. The ones that will be able to adapt to what market asks will be the preferred supplier. The ones who make less assumptions about their clients and are able to deliver to heterogeneous clients.

Similarly, in nowadays software markets, in our world, we can see companies that act like respected wizards or entrepreneurial goblins. Think of any need you have and you will see a creation made by an wizard-like corporation and countless of other that serve the same need but evolve faster (e.g SAP vs. Salesforce, Odoo; WebEx vs. Skype, Viber, Signal; AIX vs. Linux, FreeBSD). The second approach generally gives more generations of software in the same time frame so they adapt to the market quickly, they evolve smoothly. Moreover this also brings a delivery discipline. Even for desktop applications we can see a continuous delivery stream, for example Google's Chrome updates. This devops like culture that is focused on short and fast release cycles and is oriented towards value streams seems to get mainstream and thrive on every market. The only pain point is the attention to the details and the craftsmanship the wizards have in their products and that also be carried in this novel approach