Why it is important that software projects fail (2008)
For a recent confirmation of this, witness the enormous amount of effort expended on GPDR compliance.<p>None of it could have been done before computing power became so cheap that it needed to be wasted on doing it.<p>Everyone complains about useless procedures, but I think the real culprit is that we have no framework for discussing value. By that I mean the fundamental economic problem of what should we do, who should do what, how should stuff be shared?<p>In effect our current idea of value is a sort of unstated default: whatever you can get someone to do is valuable, unless it&#x27;s illegal. And what becomes illegal is also governed by never-stated assumptions.<p>So we end up with this society where anything that can take up productive capacity is done. There&#x27;s always some sort of justification that might sound reasonable in some context - privacy of personal data is indeed important - but we end up not balancing the costs with the benefits, and you end up with absurd situations where schools can&#x27;t send out mail to their alumni (yes, this actually happened to me).