A rational model of software is to design it quickly - the economic pressure to improvise presents an interesting challenge.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Software tends not to kill people, and so we accept incredibly fast innovation loops because the consequences are tolerable and the results are astonishing.
Received wisdom is that if you spend time up front getting the design right, you avoid costs later. But the longer you spend getting the design right, the more your upfront costs are, and the longer it takes for the software to start earning.
The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.
In short, software is eating the world.
A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.
At Microsoft, the magic of software is used to take on very interesting challenges.
Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists.
Well, you can't improvise story, which is a fact. If you could, the budget would be insane.
The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative.
Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.