on the first pass I read it "I'LL PRIORITISE EVERYTHING ELSE", and that made total sense... But I quickly realized it is not funny and not true to what actually happens....
This perfectly describes a two year contract I had in the 1990s.
A senior VP at a Fortune 100 company made a WIBNI (wouldn't it be nice if) statement at a speech a year earlier. He casually mentioned that how he thought it would help engineers to have function X.
The VP was a business and finance guy, and a very competent one, but he was not an engineer. Function X was one of those ideas that really does sound good, until you ask actual engineers about it, and they then spend 15 minutes listing the reasons why it really, really isn't.
As a general rule, if you think an application can make millions of dollars and can be implemented cheaply and easily, one or both of two things will be true. It won't actually make money, and/or it won't be easy to implement.
That brilliant and obvious idea has been obvious to a lot of people before you. All who actually tried have failed. Before proceeding, check to see why.
A senior manager looking to advance didn't bother to check. He heard the VP's casual comment, wrote up a business case for it, got funding, hired staff, and spent almost three years, and tens of millions of dollars (seriously) building the function.
He was successful in the sense that he got the thing built, although at a horrific cost, more than ten times the original budget. He was unsuccessful in the sense that when the finished product was complete, not one single copy was ever sold. Even the external companies that had been beta testers balked at buying it.
Eventually, it was "de-productized" and rolled into the company's major product line as a feature rather than an independent product.
Sure, a real-time latin to English translator would be neat, but few people are going to be $500 for one. But you can roll it into your word processor product as a feature and then claim it's a reason that that product is popular. And that's basically what management did.
You can't fail when you're allowed to redefine what success means.
on the first pass I read it "I'LL PRIORITISE EVERYTHING ELSE", and that made total sense... But I quickly realized it is not funny and not true to what actually happens....
This perfectly describes a two year contract I had in the 1990s.
A senior VP at a Fortune 100 company made a WIBNI (wouldn't it be nice if) statement at a speech a year earlier. He casually mentioned that how he thought it would help engineers to have function X.
The VP was a business and finance guy, and a very competent one, but he was not an engineer. Function X was one of those ideas that really does sound good, until you ask actual engineers about it, and they then spend 15 minutes listing the reasons why it really, really isn't.
As a general rule, if you think an application can make millions of dollars and can be implemented cheaply and easily, one or both of two things will be true. It won't actually make money, and/or it won't be easy to implement.
That brilliant and obvious idea has been obvious to a lot of people before you. All who actually tried have failed. Before proceeding, check to see why.
A senior manager looking to advance didn't bother to check. He heard the VP's casual comment, wrote up a business case for it, got funding, hired staff, and spent almost three years, and tens of millions of dollars (seriously) building the function.
He was successful in the sense that he got the thing built, although at a horrific cost, more than ten times the original budget. He was unsuccessful in the sense that when the finished product was complete, not one single copy was ever sold. Even the external companies that had been beta testers balked at buying it.
Eventually, it was "de-productized" and rolled into the company's major product line as a feature rather than an independent product.
Sure, a real-time latin to English translator would be neat, but few people are going to be $500 for one. But you can roll it into your word processor product as a feature and then claim it's a reason that that product is popular. And that's basically what management did.
You can't fail when you're allowed to redefine what success means.