Borg

See also: Sayings | Integration

Combining of things being folded into the same umbrella; to completely absorb and integrate something, often with callous disregard for the uniqueness of that something. It’s the opposite of diversification with less differentiation and specialization.

Borging is good:

  • Consolidation of ideas/manpower/etc.
  • Improvement through a more complete picture, putting everything necessary all in one place

Borging is bad:

  • Less emphasis on the individual, personal initiative, or creativity
  • Invention and innovation becomes less important than organization and togetherness

The term comes from a fictional race of hive-minded machine-humans with a singular emotionless, dispassionate goal to forcefully assimilating and converting race after race of humanoids, creating more machine-humans (cybernetics). This conversion is seen by the collective as for the their own good. Although the idea/fear of humans becoming machines is not new, this term comes from the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation” for the villain “The Borg.”

Their second appearance (subject of a series of 3 episodes) of “The Borg” was the most popular in the show’s history and created a lasting symbol.

Usage Examples

  • Moving Web Pages that are in the Public Domain and formatting them differently.
    • Taking the pages on takedown.net regular HTML pages and converting them here, in the simpler Wiki format is Borging.
  • Often what is done with open-source software, especially in circumstances where an author doesn’t need to notify the originator (personal use, for example) and they can just “Borg,” or absorb and use, other people’s code.
  • When a project directly competes with another project by doing a head-to-head comparison of feature-sets. The renewing project is able to “borg” another by adding all the same features plus a few more, rendering that “borged” project obsolete. While not directly taking code, borging is a form of extreme, take-no-prisoners competition.
    • When Microsoft took all of Netscape‘s features and added them to its own browser (already based on Mosaic) and then developed better usability and added even more features on top.
    • When Yahoo began snatching up Internet services for maps, e-mail, chat tools, and more, many features were taken from already existing Web sites to add to its own suite of more centralized Internet services.
  • When the development of a project changes hands, the new developer will often completely rewrite the program almost from scratch, and then borg select parts of the old program, integrating them into the new work and discarding the obsolete code.

Related Topics

TakeDown.NET -> “Borg”