Thursday, December 23, 2004

Infrastructure projects

In the TOC message group, Ron Jeffries made this amusing observation:
"We probably all know of infrastructure projects that have developed huge staffs, gone on for years, delivering nothing and ultimately coming to nothing. Those of us who don't know about these projects should report the color of the sky on their planet, for the benefit of those of us on planet Earth. "The taxi business"

I have to concur. Whenever a project does not target a specific user, but delivers a more nebulous infrastructure, it is highly unlikely that anything will get delivered.

Tool vendors get away with building infrastructure, because at the end of the day, they won't eat if they don't build something that they can sell. Internal infrastructure projects have no such limitation.