Being a venerable jockey on the internet for over the past 15-years, I thought I saw it all when it came to such technical acronyms. But today, NIH was New To Me, so I went looking for its definition and came upon some interesting application of it in differing industries of this all-too-human condition.
Of course, for me, NIH Syndrome was something I grew up with as information technology availability was encroaching upon the masses — the electronics industry pursuit for a captive market. Back then, it was coined as ‘home computing’. The home computing era was important to me, because it was a commonplace endeavor then of writing your own software programs. I fully embraced that endeavor, and as a result of that passionate pursuit, it became my choice of profession when I became an adult.
As it was back then, software availability was both sparse and expensive, so just about every home computer included a BASIC interpreter, with options to extend the language with graphics and storage commands, or to allow for programming in other popular languages such as Assembly, Forth, and Pascal. Without BASIC or the ability to write your own software programs, owning a home computer would have been completely pointless. In my opinion, the anti-competitive behavior that is a result of NIH Syndrome was a contributing factor to the video game crash of 1983, as it gave way to the long-term result of gaming console dominance shifting from the United States to Japan. Home computing begot personal computing — and a new software market was formed and essentially limited homebrew software development to the enthusiasts.
This century, I believe the lessons that have been learned from NIH Syndrome in computing include the acceptance of Open Source and GPL software within the captive market for ubiquitous, personal, and business computing alike.
