Mark Bernstein: NeoVictorian Computing: This isn’t working. We’ve been stuck for years, the backlog never goes away, and we fight the same old fights with a new generation of management. The Enterprise is too complex, too turbulent, too confused, to be a fruitful place to study the craft of software. We don’t know when it’s right. Yes, we sometimes know when it’s wrong, when we can’t even deliver the software. But what is success? Praise from a self-interested manager? An incremental improvement in corporate throughput? A pile of surveys filled in by our students? A nice writeup in The Journal?

I propose that enterprise software is a hard problem that we can understand only after we solve an easier case, one that lies close to hand. Before we can tackle the enterprise, we need to write software for people. Not software for everyone, but software for you and for me. [Awesome piece. Not to be missed.]