Best of Bleed

Some of the buzzwords that float around when you talk about technology or process improvement are getting dated. I can recall hearing "best of breed" close to twenty year ago. I heard "bleeding edge" not long after. If they were around before then, I must have been ignoring them as a bad joke. Things have come full circle.

Still, how else do we describe the particular nuance of meaning that those two phrases in particular encapsulate?

When someone says that they want to use a "best of breed" technology or methodology, they're not being specific - which always irked me - but they're committing to discovering what works for that particular scenario. For example, if you're starting a whole new project with little more than an idea of the functionality you want to offer (not how to provide it), then there is no definitive answer to the question "what is the best of breed"? At a high level, you might go down the dot-net path, or be open source, or somewhere in between. At a low level you have a myriad languages & frameworks to choose from that are very good at solving specific problems.
There is no one right answer. That's the point of saying something as unhelpful as "best of breed" - as long as you are actually intending to research a good solution (hopefully the best) for the problem at hand. You have to take advantage of other people's experiences to determine what is right for you. That takes effort in itself. Making the choice is not just "picking the low hanging fruit" (another of my pet hates).

It's usually an executive who likes to use "bleeding edge", meaning that they're not just at the forefront, but that they're ahead of it. A similar phrase is "ahead of the wave", although this latter doesn't have anywhere near the impact of the unspoken side-effect of the bleeding edge, which is that it's fundamentally dangerous, & someone can get hurt.
I suspect that few people who promote being on the bleeding edge think of the risks, but I would like to believe that those who are taking those challenges on - implementing new processes & using new technologies - know very well that failure is not an option. When people walk that fine line that leads to outpacing competitors & getting a business advantage out of doing things before anyone else, they're not trail-blazing with the expectation that others will follow, but ploughing ahead with the hope that no-one is following too close behind, & that they can find a way through the difficulties that no-one has faced before.

If you want to be treated seriously, then you have to be a person of your words. When you use "best of breed", you imply a knowledge of the problem space that supports process & technology choices that can be backed up by results. When you live on the "bleeding edge", you are promising risk of failure. You are promising unknown outcomes.

I'm not convinced that anyone is giving a guarantee of success in the former case, or setting up an expectation of failure in the latter.