I think some people who write about enterprise software either haven't worked on really big enterprise software or don't realize how it came to be bad. The problem isn't that suddenly your product started sucking -- mostly it's that inefficiencies or poor design decisions made 3 years ago suddenly start biting you in the ass.<p>In other words, software ages like people -- year to year there's not a huge difference, but 10 years later you look back and say "what the f<i></i>k happened?!"<p>Now, some software just clearly wasn't designed with usability in mind. Much more, however, was probably designed with a limited goal that was forced to quickly adapt to more complex situations. Startups and web companies have it relatively easy -- you can simply change your code on your server and suddenly everyone's up to date. Other companies have to deal with backwards compatibility and standards and shipping and all the pains of large projects in general. The people who come in saying "Well the people in charge are just idiots. If <i>I</i> were in charge we'd have SCRUM and new languages and modern development practices and everything would fix itself immediately!" really don't know what they're talking about.<p>I think that the article has some good points (not getting involved enough with the actual users is a big one), but they're really too young to say "we have found the Holy Grail!" Removing features, especially, strikes me as something which sounds like a good idea but can really hurt you as a business. When your customer is a 300 person mid-size corporation you can easily say, "well, we had to make some changes here and that feature had to go." When your customer is a retail giant employing 300,000 people all over the country, you think very, very carefully about removing that feature.