Re-inventing the Wheel... as a Square

A lot has been said about not reinventing the wheel. But how about not repeating errors Errors are like wheels that we shouldn t even have tried to invent, let alone re-invent, because this wheel was probably square in shape to start with, and there was never any chance of it succeeding. 

Yet some may be surprised to know how often this may already have happened. And will happen again. It s just that we don t hear much about it. 

Here is a list of some eyebrow raising situations which caught my attention over the years. The examples leave one incredulous. 

A telecom project required a rack of several 3000 W Power Factor Corrected (PFC) hot-pluggable power supplies. Two brilliant teams went about it, one writing C++ code and the other designing the power sections and the backplane. This was to operate off a 3-phase AC mains supply. 

Then the Marketing guys appeared and informed them that they just couldn t sell it — Because in many countries and areas, a 3-phase incoming supply point does not even include the Neutral wire (which in any case is not even designed to carry that much of return current either). This was a complete dead-end. But couldn t the Marketing guys have got, involved a little earlier Say about 2 years before the project came to a head  

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