Lit. Buffer overruns 1696
I respectfully disagree.
I think that is an over-generalization.
It has nothing to do with whether the customers are internal or external, or whether there is money involved, but the variance among the customer needs, and the organizations' dedication to the product.
spit Perhaps. Don't knock unless you've tried it. :-) Internal politics makes development work a real headache. What tradeoffs you choose makes a huge difference. I wrote more about some in another post...
As to the "make any money" part: Some organizations, including the one I work for, *do* apportion the cost of internal software across the various departments. While it all comes out of the same pie at the top of the organization, if the operations people want the engineering group to implement some special feature, they will have to allocate some fraction of this year's budget to that feature, and will have to consume so many fewer paper clips, or whatever other cutbacks they need.
On the other hand, look at something like the F-OSS movement, where some projects track user problems (SPRs) as seriously as (Oh, hell -- let's not kid ourselves ... Orders of magnitude *more* seriously than...) certain software giants.
Let's put a concrete face on the problem:
On the one hand, you have the people-to-become USG distributing Fourth Edition to internal customers, who are using it for various purposes ranging from purely experimental to support to operational. Each of these users has widely varying needs in terms of performance, reliability, and functionality.
On the other hand, imagine Grace L. Ferguson Storm Door and Software Company, who have developed the end-all, be-all of downhole telemetry analysis software for oil wells. They have twelve customers, all of which are oil companies, or major olfield operators. They have a much smaller problem-space to tune for - in that all of these customers have the same FUNDAMENTAL needs.
lots of organization have oscillated between the two spectrums .... in-house operations required to provide significant compebreastive advantage to various business units as opposed to being a...
In summary -- the complexity of managing a software project is based soley on the variance of the needs of the users of that project, whether it is one person sitting alone in his office, or a million independent customers spread across the world.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Computer software consists of only two components: ones and zeros, in roughly equal proportions. All that is required is to sort them into the correct order.