I thought the studies showed that changing habits and implementing massive software systems tend to fail?
Certainly you hear more about the failures, but that be because they get better press. Not sure about any studies, would love to see a link or two if you have them lying around.
quotes:
At companies that aren’t among the top 25% of technology users, three out of 10 IT projects fail on average.
AND
On average, about 70% of all IT-related projects fail to meet their objectives.” In this case Lewis includes not only projects that were abandoned (failed), but also those that were defectively completed due to cost overruns, time overruns, or did not provide all of the functionality that was originally promised.
The difference between failure in the two quotes is that the first one seems to consider failure as just abandoned completely as being unachievable. Whereas the second also considers failure as not having achieved all goals.
It seems to me that if the project is big and central enough to a company's processes that it might be worth betting against the survival of that company.
successes rarely get written up. so finding details on them is much harder.
also depends what you mean by fail.
if fail means "ran over budget and hit loads of unexpected problems" then yeah, most probably do "fail".
if fail means "shut down prematurly and abandoned without hope" then afaik, your only really talking about stuff by google and microsoft. most other software houses would fail with their software. and plenty are still arond from the 90s.
intel. ibm. apple... not so much real fail, for example.