Network World

I’ve written in several books about Platt’s Laws of the Universe. These are my attempts to quantify universal truths that I’ve observed in my travels through this crazy software business. A reader just asked me if I’d written them all down in any one place. So for this blog entry, I thought I’d collect them here.

Platt’s First Law: “ Every software project takes three times as long as your best estimate, even if you apply this law to it.” This one is subtitled “Exponential Estimation Explosion”. Example: Windows.

Platt’s Second Law: “The amount of crap in the Universe is conserved.” If you have less crap right here, you must have more crap over there, because there’s no such thing as making it disappear. Example: Windows Vista.

Platt’s Third Law: “Laziness trumps everything.” Every human being ever born is inherently lazy, and can be relied upon to do the absolute minimum amount of work he can get away with (or less), under any and all circumstances. Therefore, (first corollary) that which is easy to do will be done frequently, whether it should be or not, and that which is difficult to do will be done infrequently, whether it should be or not. Therefore, (second corollary) a good design makes the good, safe, smart things easy to do, and the bad, dangerous, stupid things hard to do. Alternate phrasing of the second corollary: “Always put a hand guard on your meat slicer.”