With all credit to Alton Brown, guru of the kitchen, for the headline, I salute the spirited tradition of reuse in IT. Coming from a thrifty IT background in higher education (both in the resource-starved central IT facilities of a very decentralized R1 university and then the even-more-resource-starved central IT operations of smaller schools) my instinct is always to reach into the bag of tools I have before I buy or build or download something new. If I can stretch an existing tool to meet a new need, then I already know most of what I need to know to get the job done. If I need something new, I have to learn not just the new solution's workings, both how it solves the problem and how to control it (that is, function and interface), but also its view of the world, the guiding concepts and philosophy that shape the function and the UI. If you think of text as structured, with presentation driven by structure, you wind up with one kind of tool (TeX) and if you think of it as a bunch of characters with attributes you wind up with another (Word). Each kind of tool can then extend to accomodate the requirements of the other -- adding structured text characteristics to Word, for example.

To make repurposing more functional and tenable over time, it helps to buy tools that by design are meant to serve more than one purpose and that embody a very expansive view of the world. Search is a very broadly applicable function in IT: we have all spent much time in many tools mastering the quirks, limitations, or intricacies of search within it, from Emacs to Excel. So, search tools that can extend their ability to search across input types, like Google desktop, are automatically very useful, adaptable to many situations. Tools that can extend the search across platforms and sources of information would only increase that utility, and tools that, like our old Unix friends sed and grep and awk, can easily become part of a chain of applications that bite off and chew up the data from disparate sources for digestion by still other tools, would maximize it.