I am sure many of you have heard the project management mantra: time, quality, cost pick two. There are many variations on this theme which in essence means there is an elastic relationship between time, quality and cost so the faster you work, usually the lower the quality and the more the cost and so on.
In life there are many triangles that we manage in terms of trade-offs. In this posting we are going to talk about the convenience triangle. We all want things to be more convenient, but in technology we are paying a cost for all of this convenience in terms of quality and privacy.
This triangle came to mind this weekend when I whipped out my Blackberry to snap a picture at an event I am attending. The convenience of the Blackberry (I always have it with me) outweighs the fact the picture quality is nowhere near the quality of even my little Sony point and shoot digital camera. I won't even talk about my Nikon digital SLR camera which takes tremendous pictures. In addition to lower picture quality the Blackberries camera feature set is a small fraction of what a dedicated camera provides.
Of course once I take the picture, there is no way I want to wait and have it printed, I simply upload the ones I like directly from my Blackberry straight to a Facebook album. Here is the third leg of the triangle, privacy. I am willing to upload the picture over a wireless network to share with my friends on Facebook. Of course I tag the people in the picture with my Facebook friends names (as they do with the pictures they take) adding more information and context to the pictures, but giving up more privacy along the way.
At the end of the day I have made peace with this triangle of life's compromises, but it is important to understand these trade-offs and make informed choices when facing your triangles of life.
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