Photographers tend to suffer from Gear Acquisition Syndrome. They believe they will make better pictures with new gear and buy new lenses, cameras, and flashlights.

Then they find their work does not improve.

In IT, we do the same.

We have our old relational database management system.

But now we have this great Spark, MongoDB, CouchDB, or what have you. (I’m just taking a not-so-random example.) So now everything must be converted to Spark or Mongo.

We even forget that this old technology, the relational DBMS in this example, was so good at reliably processing transactions. It worked!

The new database is massively scalable, which is great. Unfortunately, it does not improve the reliability of processing our transactions.

But it’s hot, so we want it—because Google has it. Errr, but will you also use it to process web page indexes? Ah, no. You want to store your customer records in it. So, is it reliable? No. But it is satisfying our GAS.