Cheap, Fast, Good. Pick Any Two

Whenever you are doing anything, looking for a product or a service,  this basic axiom holds.  You can have it cheap and fast, but it won't be good (ex. McDonald's).  You can have it cheap and good, but it won't be fast (ex. making a gourmet meal at home).  And you can have it good and fast, but it won't be cheap (going to a gormet restauraunt).

The arguments don't work in reverse.  Similarly, you can have one of the three. There are lots of examples of things that are expensive, slow and good, expensive slow and bad, cheap slow and bad, etc.  But I have never seen an example of something that is truely cheap, truly fast, and truly good.

Sometimes we might be fooled into thinking that we have found something that fits all three constraints, but there is something we have missed.  Perhaps we have not accounted for some hidden cost and have violated the cheap constraint.  Perhaps we have missed a step or a detail and accounting for that violates the fast constraint.  Or perhaps we are fooled into thinking something is good and it ends up not being any good.

The main idea here is that there is no silver bullet.  There is no perpetual motion machine.  There is no money tree.  This is not a negative outlook on the world, but it is one that accepts the realities of it.  There are laws of physics.  There are rules of economies.  There are costs of innovation.