Five New Monkeys
There is a well-known parable about five monkeys. It is not really about monkeys. It is about what happens when a group keeps enforcing a rule long after the original reason for that rule has disappeared. In AV and Location Based Entertainment, that pattern shows up all the time.
Five monkeys are placed in a habitat with a ladder in the middle. At the top of the ladder hangs a bunch of bananas. Naturally, one of the monkeys climbs the ladder to grab the bananas. When it does, the researchers spray the rest of the monkeys with cold water. After a few attempts, the monkeys quickly learn the connection.
Before long, whenever a monkey even tries to climb the ladder, the other monkeys pull it down and beat it up to stop it.
But none of them will climb the ladder. And if a new monkey tries, the group will still beat it up.
Because that is just the way things are done.
That is how large parts of this industry still operate.
Too many teams inherit technical assumptions from the last project, then production assumptions from the last technical stack, then budget assumptions from the last production model. Eventually those assumptions stop looking like choices and start being treated like physics.
We chose a different starting point.
We built a system that bases AV hardware on non-proprietary compute node hardware rather than on closed black box endpoints. That decision changed the problem space.
We did not set o