When software — or idea-ware for that matter — fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of the messaging of the idea. It is an Accessibility failure.

Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes, there’s more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy howdy are the two ever at odds.

But I’ll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.

I never got around quoting this section of the epic Steve Yegge rant about Google; it’s possibly the most important part of an enormously enjoyable and well written rant (you, know, like the other epic rants Steve published over the years, and I’m not going to link them all); the vast majority of morons on the Internet closed the tab after reading Steve’s rant thinking: wow, G+ is really a piece of shit; a small, enlightened fraction pondered on the meaning of creating a Service, instead of a Product; but I bet less than 0.1% of those got to the paragraphs above and realised that of the ~3700 words in the entire rant, those are the most important.