Prediction: The gardener was swiftly sentenced to execution.

Sounds like the gardener was the equivalent to Congress today.

Fact: blogoscoped is dead.

Crataan fruits give me the runs.

I'm very confused and scared by this post. :(

The post it not visible on the main page, which is a very good thing.

Cute story, but what's the point? Is this a cryptic allegory about Google Plus? The closing of Slide? Fragmentation of Android?

Thought it was about A/B testing? But then the analogy should be 90% of the orchard planted with the most popular fruit and 10% being used for testing new varieties, shouldn't it?

Sounds like an SEO attempt to garner first page organic search results for crataan. I prefer weeds/plants... Japanese knotweed, for resveratrol, bluplerum for saikosaponin a, and Astragalus for cycloastragenol...

Or this story is about...

How annoying subordinates can sound when proposing ideas for a personal garden that ... then makes it impersonable... arghhh

Off with his head!!!

Obviously, the gardener is now dead. And the garden is still with no plants till a more obsecuent gardener is found :)

Just pointing out the obvious... the gardener was suggesting that no Crataan fruit trees be planted. I wonder if he knew that.

This story makes me think about engineers and product managers. I'm not sure which is the PM and which the engineer, though.

What I'm interested in is the climate-control technology and botanical storehouse that this gardener must have access to to be able to realistically consider selecting and growing a completely randomly selected tree!

Nice story, but didn't find exact moral. Can anyone suggest me?

Nice, an Emperror who outwitted by a gardener, lol

Or, a parable about how when you ask other's opinions the goals differ greatly. as you completely eliminated the original fruit with all the other suggestions.

Agree. "Sounds like the gardener was the equivalent to Congress today.", or anything like US Congress. For example, Google search. Nowadays, after so much intelligence was added to the engine, very often the returned results contains no some keywords I search.

I wonder whether this story has some SEO purpose, given that the Crataan Empire "is a fantasy empire in the game MineCraft", and already this blog post ranks third in the search results for Crataan.

I enjoy reading along the comments, and just wanted to say that all fruit names were thought up "on the spot" during writing, so it's a coincidence if any of them was previously used elsewhere or has any meaning. If it turns out the word is too known in mainstream culture it might be worth amending it to not get in the way of the story, but the lesser known its other meanings are the more it's useful in terms of the story I wanted to tell (which is not a story about Minecraft Empires). As an exercise, try to come up with a random, short, fantasy tale-sounding word: then when you did, paste the word into Google and see how many results and other meanings you'll get...