Quelle: CSO, USA

LET'S START WHERE conversations about software usually end: Basically,software sucks.

In fact, if software were an office building, it would be built by athousand carpenters, electricians and plumbers. Without architects. Orblueprints. It would look spectacular, but inside, the elevators wouldfail regularly. Thieves would have unfettered access through openvents at street level. Tenants would need consultants to move in. Theywould discover that the doors unlock whenever someone brews a pot ofcoffee. The builders would provide a repair kit and promise that suchidiosyncrasies would not exist in the next skyscraper they build(which, by the way, tenants will be forced to move into).

Strangely, the tenants would be OK with all this. They'd tolerate thecosts and the oddly comforting rhythm of failure and repair that cameto dominate their lives. If someone asked, "Why do we put up with thisbuilding?" shoulders would be shrugged, hands tossed and sighs heaved."That's just how it is. Basically, buildings suck."

The absurdity of this is the point, and it's universal, because thesoftware industry is strangely irrational and antithetical to commonsense. It is perhaps the first industry ever in which shoddiness isnot anathema - it's simply expected. In many ways, shoddiness is thegoal. "Don't worry, be crappy," Guy Kawasaki wrote in 2000 in hisbook, Rules for Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creatingand Marketing New Products and Services. "Revolutionary means you shipand then test," he writes. "Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap."