"Truly great software development"

Charles Zedlewski of SAP has a nice post on his summer reading on large technology product developments including The History of Software, Showstopper! and The Soul of a New Machine. He expresses his admiration of large (and immensely successful) industry projects like Windows NT, SAP R/3, Sun Java, Lotus Notes, OS/360. As he says in the comments "Common among all of these products: it took a sizeable group of very smart people several years working as a tight team to get there."

I would also throw in Oracle 8, Netware, Google - no question the software industry has had some outstanding products. And when you look at what the FAA is attempting with the National Air Grid or the National Weather Service with Hurricane tracking, the mega software project is alive and well. No arguments with Charles so far.

But then he proceeds to quote questions around the current mindset of “Anything worth doing can be done with three engineers and some Ruby on Rails.” "The really grand dreams of humanity increasingly require immense resources and armies of skilled people; however nimble, small agencies are ill equipped to marshal the required people and resources."

That got me going. You can see the passionate banter in the comments. Everything does not have to be big. SAP is particular, I believe, needs to be sensitive to the fact that a lot of bigness - and a lot of waste - has been justified in its name.

Charles responds "I also don't care if CIO's see art or passion in a great software product. That doesn't affirm or negate its greatness. If they refuse to pay money for it, well that's a different story."

That is the story, Charles. CIOs do spend $ 100 billion each year with the big software vendors (and much more with integrators and smaller software companies). I would argue for that spend there have been too few NTs and OS/360s, and way too many delayed MS Vistas and poor quality Oracle 11s. And massive overruns on customer implementation projects.

Greatness to me is not just an exciting product - it is also one developed by the vendor and available to be implemented by customers at  a reasonable budget. And this is where constraint based thinking like that around Ruby on Rails is good for the industry. More for less. Much more for much less.