Why I Believe in Categories, Just Not Category Design

Imagine you’re walking down a beach and find a watch. You pick it up, inspect its intricate mechanism, admire how precisely all the pieces fit together, and conclude that something so complex and precisely engineered couldn’t possibly have arisen by chance: there must have been a designer.Wait. That’s intelligent design. In today's post, I’m supposed to be talking about category design, but my reaction to the two ideas is surprisingly similar. I’m instinctively suspicious when people look at something complex that emerged from a messy, evolutionary process and work backwards to infer the existence of a designer. In biology, that process is natural selection; in enterprise software, it’s what I think of as the rugby scrum of the market, where technology, customers, vendors, partners, standards bodies, investors, analysts, and the media all push against each other until something resembling a category eventually emerges.Now imagine, on that lovely beach walk, that instead of stumbling…