The Shape of Everything
A website mostly about Mac stuff, written by August "Gus" Mueller
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January 2, 2007
(This post is from my old, old, super old site. My views have changed over the years, hopefully my writing has improved, and there is now more than a handful of folks reading my site. Enjoy.)

I was talking to Kirstin the other day about why it can take so much longer for a product to get out the door than originally estimated. Besides an ever-expanding feature list, I think one of the major problems is having to meet a level of expectations that has been raised so much higher over the years. There is a a lot of hard work that goes into making things easy and obvious (which is totally appropriate). However, I think sometimes developers can get caught in a trap of trying to make things too "perfect".

"Like Chinese Democracy" Kirstin said.

To which I replied- "That's the perfect analogy. I'm going to blog that."

In case you haven't heard of it already, Chinese Democracy is an album that Axl Rose, the singer of Guns N' Roses, has been working on for a very, very long time. The hold up is because he wants to get everything "perfect". So it never ships.

So I think the name it should be called when applied to everything else is "Chinese Democracy Syndrome", or CDS for short. It's possible there's already a term out there for this, but I just really like this one, and had to share.