Steve, how dumb do you think management is? Why would a company spend >=$1B+ in OpEx and CapEx just because somebody convinced them instead of seeing any technical value whatsoever?
Did you ever have an interaction with your manager where they could not understand the technical details of a project and insisted on only a high-level overview?
People understand the world through dimensionality reduction and lossy compression of information in domains that they are not involved on a daily basis. This causes an inherent issue when you stack these phenomena across multiple organizational levels; this is how you end up with Intel's or Ballmer-era Microsoft's management failures, to use some non-WITCH examples, or the issues that we're talking about in this article.
Management is human, just like everyone else. They absolutely make their share of truly stupid decisions. It's just they have more power, so their stupid decisions cost way more and affect more people.
People understand the world through dimensionality reduction and lossy compression of information in domains that they are not involved on a daily basis. This causes an inherent issue when you stack these phenomena across multiple organizational levels; this is how you end up with Intel's or Ballmer-era Microsoft's management failures, to use some non-WITCH examples, or the issues that we're talking about in this article.