A terrifying picture

Many years ago, when I was a middle schooler, my parents went to an exhibition of Raghu Rai's photographs.  Raghu Rai is a celebrated photographer whose pictures often offer unique perspectives.  You can call him the Ansel Adams of India.

When my parents came home, my dad said he had seen the most terrifying photograph ever.  I thought it would be something from a horror movie, but the answer was an enigma - a photo of an elderly gentleman wearing insanely expensive clothes that showed repairs done using dirt-cheap materials.  I was puzzled.

A decade later, my dad explained why it terrified him.  The man's dress amply showed that he or his family had serious money at one point in time.  The fact that he could afford to have it repaired only with cheap materials meant that he and his family had fallen on hard times.  The reversal of fortune gave him nightmares.

Years later, I understood why the picture scared him.  This image troubled him because he knew cousins who had squandered their inheritances.  And he had seen colleagues heading towards a challenging retirement because they had barely saved anything.  And, partly, he was afraid of his own situation, fearing that what he had banked wouldn't be enough.  He frequently told me I had to stand on my own two feet because there was no financial cushion to fall back on.

We know many software companies in the tech world that have gone from riches to oblivion.  The dot-com bust obliterated many companies.  Today, Yahoo is a shadow of its former self.  I can rattle off so many websites that I have bookmarked but never go to because either the same information is available in a better form elsewhere or the website has ceased to exist.  No matter how great a website may have been, one needs to improve continuously or be crushed under the wheels of progress.

As software engineers, we know the speed at which promising technologies become yesterday's news.  Regardless of how trailblazing our products might be, many competitors are eager to beguile our customers and eat into our market share.