[wpietri]

Your point about estimate risk is excellent.

I agree you can't run a business without any idea when anything will ship. But to get a good idea when things will ship, you don't need estimates.

For example, in the Lean world there's something I've heard called "Disneyland scheduling". You break the project down into lumps. You maintain a queue of the lumps. You measure the average time from position X in the queue to being released.

Now you have a reasonable early warning system for when things will ship. Which is generally much better than what people have with most projects, which is a fantasy date.