The Twelve Month Question

Tonight I was having a chat with David Halliday (recent of the Sharepoint team in Redmond) and we got to talking about variety in terms of work.  I think at one point I said something along the lines of "let’s face it, if you haven’t solved (a business problem) within twelve months, you probably won’t, and if you have – it becomes a maintenance project".

To me there’s more than a grain of truth there.  How many of us feel too narrowly focused when working on a particular project for more than 12 months end to end?  Is this a byproduct of the changing IT landscape (and the never ending barrage of language, tooling and platforms)?

For example, I’ve been thinking of subject matter which would be appropriate for TechEd this year.  Traditionally, I’ve avoided such temptations (not from a lack of preparedness, but for a lack of vertical subject matter) and drawn blanks simply due to the wide variety of subjects (Windows Mobile 6, SQL Server 2008, ADO EF/ADO Data Services, Robotics Studio 1.5 (CCR) and the list goes on).

Anyhow, if choice and variety is the spice of life, we certainly don’t have a shortage.  What do you think?

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