Why is enterprise software so bad?

1. In my experience, most managers in the software development world started out as developers themselves. In our organizations, most of us managers still do a fair amount of development as well.

2. This is true. But how can it be otherwise? Anywhere in this world we must make decisions based on how to allocate limited resources. This is true even for open source development. A project must finish at some point, else it's a failure to begin with. Thus, we cannot invest infinite resource, and must decide how much we can invest in each part of a system.

3. I have not found this to be true. Virtually everyone I have ever worked with takes pride in doing a good job. Can you cite evidence to the contrary?

4. I'm not sure what this means.

I think that much of the problem has to do with #2 and maybe #4 (depending what you meant). That is, many important enterprise projects are just as big as large "shrinkwrap" software. But the number of customers is smaller, so the cost of development must be amortized over a smaller set of buyers. This means that there must be some balance of higher prices and cost-cutting. I suspect that the economics works out so that cost-cutting pressures are stronger in the enterprise arena than for shrinkwrap products.