I enjoyed this comment: “Little story: I did a lot of work with Army grunts trying to avoid getting blown up. The main tool was excel. Software shops kept delivering junk that nobody used. The acquisitions guys loved a slick demo and that’s pretty much all it did. They’d come in and install a new server cluster, which means a bigger server room, which means more cooling, which means a bigger generator, which means more diesel trucks, which means more convoys on the road, which means more getting blown up. New grunts would tool around on it for a month and then get a novel task they had to use excel for, and never go back. The acq guys had such disdain for the ‘users’ that they couldn’t imagine that they actually knew WTF they were doing. The slick demo went on to win the DCGS contract, and now they’re stuck with ‘easy’ where they need flexible, customizable, fast, simple (all the way down the stack).”