(great thoughts sundial)

one of the reasons we've done this to ourselves is that software (even in its most trivial applications) is actually quite complicated, but we put a gui on it, and make it look easy.

One of the reasons that designs fail is that we fail to take that complexity fully into the design, and therefore fail to parcel it out to the right people, with the right know-how, and to top it all off we put some money-man or non-software boss on top of it all and expect them to be useful to us.

Sure the money's nice, but they really don't contribute much by way in terms of expertise.