[LapsangGuzzler]

> I encourage you to compare the productivity of the modern multinational corporation to any commune in history. The people working in collectives are not stupid or lazy. It's not an effective structure.

It’s a hard comparison to make when the goals of those two systems are vastly different.

I worked for a multinational software company and the amount of waste I saw was just staggering. If outside shareholders knew how little we actually produced on a day to day basis, they would probably be appalled. But because the company knew how to engage with market analysts, we looked good on paper. So much of the money made today involves just being the biggest player in a given market, regardless of how effective the product is (i.e. “nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft”)

[phs318u]

But maximum efficiency does not scale linearly with organisational size/product complexity. So yes, lots of wastage, but still possibly the least wastage of other tried-and-tested organisational models.

Also, effectiveness of software relates to the attributes that align to the dimensions of "goodness" as defined by each user not the developer. The software does not have to be the best (among its peers) to be the most effective for me. The same software may be completely ineffective for you, if what you want out of it is different to what I want.