[lknuth]

Making it solely about the extraction of dollars is a great recipe to make something mediocre. See Hollywood or Microslop.

Its like min-maxing a Diablo build where you want the quality of the product to be _just_ above the "acceptable" threshold but no higher because that's wasting money. Then, you're free to use all remaining points to spec into revenue.

[cmarot]

Exactly. In addition, sometimes a good software "only" makes you save 1% of your time, but that 1% was a terrible burden that induced mental fatigue, made you take bad decisions, etc. It can even make a great Engineer stay when he would have left with the previous version.

[devmor]

While reading the article I was thinking the same thing. I can think of problems I've solved that directly affected 0% of our customers, but overloaded our customer support team.