That's a problem every company working with atomic products (not radioactive, but material, made of atoms, not bits) have. Software can be rewritten easily (most of the time, or provided enough time), but huge factories that rely on very expensive machines are not easy to substitute.

You can apply that adage to the struggle of the chip industry for creating new kind of processors which will produce less bugs and less heat. They will use the only tool they have, silicon, instead of researching new ways of solving the problem (see the Transmeta project).

This old chestnut addresses one of the largest problems in any industry, or any area where creative problem solving is required - a lack of diversity. Often people will find a method of solving problems and then insist on applying that solution to every other problem that they encouter, even if it's totally unrelated.

And to disagree with naked_ape's writeup, it actually is something that does affect the software industry quite a bit. I work in a small company (28 people including admin staff), and this problem crops up quite a lot. Any problem, no matter what it's nature, generally elicts the same responses:

You can then further break this down to the way the individual developers respond, again regardless of the problem:

This reaction is completely normal - if all you know is XML, then either you'll diagnose it as an XML problem or keep your mouth shut. The solution is diversity and cross-training. That way problems are diagnosed and solved much faster.

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