Candidate Software Analogy 2: Obama is 1.0, Clinton 3.x.y
The New York Times did a what now seems inevitable article comparing Clinton to a PC and Obama to a Mac. (Not sure a summary of the comparison is even needed, or even the article. It’s pretty obvious where it goes.)
I think the better analogy is that Obama is a 1.0 software release and Clinton a 3.x.y.
Obama 1.0 is full of promise, free of legacy, naive about marketing, and, being untested in the market, quite possibly everything it promises to be (and even what you hope for). While operating Obama 1.0, it has a clean feel, offers ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ moments of fresh surprise, and whatever isn’t working isn’t so bad: it’s 1.0 after all.
Clinton, on the other hand, is 3.x.y: all cruft and spaghetti code and in need of patches and special drivers. There are very features (positions) that you arrive at through a clear path, and when you do get there, they’re so laden with marketing ideas and embellishments that you’re never quite certain it’s what you asked for, want, or need. When you trace the history of any feature, the path is so circuitous and constrained by legacy issues, that you wonder how it all hangs together, or if it hangs together at all.
That’s not as loaded as it sounds - in many ways, it’s a rehash of the generational issue. Obama’s inexperience, like JFK’s, is free of cruft and spaghetti code, while having the added virtue of allowing people to project hopes and dreams onto the candidacy. Clinton’s experience, while showing market strength and durability, has the drawback of grounding a person in reality.