Re: [Bloat] building a better toaster

[Jonathan Morton <chromatix99@gmail.com>]

> On 2 Jul, 2018, at 2:34 am, David Collier-Brown <davec-b@rogers.com> wrote:
> 
> If you put your cost accountants in one silo and your engineers in another, you get to be an ex-company (;-))

Maybe so, but if you let the former have absolute authority over the latter, you'll end up with the same shoddy far-eastern-made crap as everyone else, because buying the standard mass-produced components and plugging them together is all the budget will allow for.  Likewise, if you let Marketing dictate the schedule, you *will* end up releasing something unfinished and buggy as hell, because it took 80% of the time to reach feature-complete and the remaining 20% is distribution lead-time, not available for debugging or even basic usability testing.

The fact that both of the above happen far too often is a source of intense frustration.  The fact that many retailers won't even bother stocking a higher-quality product that happens to exist is downright *insulting*.

I could give you all sorts of railway analogies to go with this.  The British railway industry alone is a rich vein of examples of abject stupidity contrasted with brilliance.

There is a middle ground.  Have cost be one of the factors for the engineers to optimise for, but don't make it the overriding factor.  Tell them the commercial benefits of shipping in time for the holiday season, or back-to-school, or whatever - but let *them* decide if it's worth rushing the product out to meet that schedule.  Consequently, you'll get a better product that might just surprise the market.

 - Jonathan Morton