Eric Sink deserves the Garry Kasparov Medal of Strategic Brilliance!

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. Next → ← Previous

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