When 'Team System' was first announced, there were murmurs of doom for Eric Sink's flagship product, "Vault". Vault exists in a niche market, relying on the badness of source-safe to attract new customers. Now that source safe is being replaced with the source control components of Visual Studio Team System, it seemed that Vault's niche market would dissappear. The worry was evident when Eric invested some of his time in trying to escape the whole source-control rat race.

But Eric's a smart guy, loves to play games, thinks a lot, and knows a lot about strategy.

So he's done a Miyagi.

In karate kid, when someone threw a punch at Mr Miyagi, he'd step aside and use the power of that punch to throw his opponent to the floor.

Eric's looked at the situation and he's wondered something like: "How can we use the power of team system to inflate us, rather than defeat us?" (i'm paraphrasing here... sorry eric... i can't read minds, actually)

In economics (and gambling) they call this "hedging". Here's the hedging strategy, expressed as a code snippet:

if (MicrosoftTeamSystem.isSuccessful) {

  //Teamprise brings the goodness of VSTS to Mac/Unix/Eclipse
  Teamprise.isSuccessful = true;

} else {

  //Vault is an alternative to sourcesafe *and* an alternative to VSTS
  Vault.isSuccessful = true;

}


And there you have it. I'm just gobsmacked at the simplicity and the brilliance of the move. If the people from skype don't win the next poker world championship (could you keep a straight face while bluffing for 2 billion dollars?), then e.sink is a shoe-in.

'Eric Sink' on Fri, 23 Sep 2005 18:15:31 GMT, sez:

Your code has a small bug -- it neglects to recognize the two other possibilities:

1. Both bools could end up false. Obviously this is not likely. :-)

2. Both bools could end up true. In this case, I get a 12 cylinder car. :-)

Great post. Thanks for the laugh.

PS: Winnable Solitaire was *never* a serious play.

'secretGeek' on Sat, 24 Sep 2005 11:33:53 GMT, sez:

Okay -- i am **seriously** impressed!

This blog has been visited by the next world poker champion!

...in response -- there *will* be some truth in each bool -- since (as i've said before) there are few true booleans in real life.

but i didn't think they had cars (of any sort) in 'champaign illinois' (or whatever that town is called)

cheers Eric! drop by again soon!

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