“Can’t we shorten a project plan by looking at the dependencies and starting some releases in parallel with others? Of course we could, but in doing so, we increase project risk. When working on several unrelated pieces of software at the same time, the individual developers may only work on one thing at a time, but the managers and the testers and especially the stake holders who are thinking about functionality and exercising change control are overloaded, so they will make poorer decisions.

“The average home buyer is unable to tell the difference between a good house and a bad house, so they settle for superficial distinctions. Tract houses are designed for the features that all inexperienced clients want to buy, making owners and tract houses interchangeable.

The really important architectural decisions are the ones that address how each client is unique, not what all clients have in common.

“Experts use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda.

“In a market where the seller has more information about the product than the buyer, bad products can drive the good ones out of the market.

“The new Kensington Oval has named one end after Malcolm Marshall and the other after Joel Garner, the neatest possible tribute to the fact that for a few years in the Eighties, two of the world’s best fast bowlers were opening the bowling together for a small island. Even Sir Viv didn’t make many against those two.

There seems to be an unwritten rule that one room at every ground [in England?] has to be named after David Gower. He is surely worth more - a stand at Grace Road, Leicester, perhaps, strategically placed for a square cut at one end and a pull at the other.

“Have you been to your public library? It’s like Starbucks, but free of charge, noise, and corporate branding.

“Print has one supreme flaw: ink is indelible. [No matter how good the static design,] the reader has the challenge of visually or physically navigating through the entire data space to find the group of interest. The modern computer system provides the first visual medium in history to overcome this restriction. Liberating us from the permanence of publication is the undersung crux of the computer—the dynamic display screen. Its pixels are magic ink—capable of absorbing their context and reflecting a unique story for every reader. And the components surrounding the display—CPU, storage, network, input devices—are just peripherals for inferring context.

“..as technology races ahead, people are tolerating increasingly worse design just to use it. Good design makes people happy, but feature count makes people pay.

“People constantly settle for ugly, clunky software, but demand informative, professionally-designed books, newspapers, magazines, and—ironically—brochures, ads, and manuals for that very software. As brochures have become websites, this duality has veered into absurdity: “Let’s design beautiful software to sell our ugly software!” The wrapper tastes better than the candy.