Nicholas? [LWN.net]

Nicholas?

Posted Jan 8, 2009 12:40 UTC (Thu) by dcbw (guest, #50562)
In reply to: Nicholas? by dlang
Parent article: Changes at OLPC

From somebody who worked on it, a huge problem with management was moving goalposts and featuritis, because if they didn't have feature X right away they weren't going to be able to close the deal with country Y, thus every single one of our goal-directed monthly snapshots was blown by 2 weeks of work on a new hot-button feature that usually proved pointless or a lot less important.

Second, because management kept talking to a number of quite different countries with quite different requirements, they weren't able to distill the *actual* software goals down to something managable. Had they decided to only target kids without a roofed school in the bush (or only kids in higher-density schools with WiFi APs), it would have been a lot easier to nail. Instead, to sell the laptop, management had to have *both* of those. And that's only one example of this behavior and thinking.

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Nicholas?

Posted Jan 8, 2009 20:10 UTC (Thu) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link] (3 responses)

This sounds really familiar. Let me tell you a similar story.

I can think of a commercial Debian derivative that was hideously late in launching because of factors like this. "[A] huge problem with management was moving goalposts and featuritis, because if they didn't have feature X right away they weren't going to be able to close the deal with [hypothetical target market]*."

We went back and forth repeatedly, suffering identity crises over whether we were targeting "the enterprise" (because big, high-margin contracts are where the money is), or "grandma" (because high-volume, low-margin retail sales are where the money is). We slipped horrendously. I don't remember now but I'm pretty sure it was over 6 months.

Ultimately, while the product did finally ship and actually got good reviews, we captured neither market, laid off two-thirds of the staff, and fundamentally changed the business model of the company.

* While our founder was by no means an unknown figure, when one's brother formerly oversaw right-wing death squads in Honduras, one likely commands a degree of attention from, and shares a common language with, officials in third-world countries who can get things done.

Nicholas?

Posted Jan 8, 2009 20:40 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (1 responses)

You didn't mention the part about investing a ton of money in distributed filesystem development which became meaningless as disks got bigger.

Nicholas?

Posted Jan 11, 2009 5:24 UTC (Sun) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link]

No, mainly because I wasn't on that team, but the distro one.

Oddly enough, something useful did come out of that work. The "nullfs" kernel module later became part of a customer's proprietary backup solution.

When I look back on my years there, the failures I see were primarily not technological in nature. I don't know if that's good fortune, or an experience most software developers have. I've seen some ugly, ugly code, more of it proprietary than free.

Even dpkg is better described as "self-consciously eccentric" than "ugly".

Nicholas?

Posted Jan 9, 2009 13:34 UTC (Fri) by csigler (subscriber, #1224) [Link]

"... moving goalposts and featuritis...."

FWIW, in the business sector (and esp. IT) in the U.S., this frequently encountered problem is jokingly (and dyslexically :) referred to as:

"Feeping Creaturitis"