Leaving Kansas

Ed is absolutely right: these are the best of times and the worst of times for the software industry. Indeed, if you are part of any one of the many new software companies that have sprung up of late and are madly burning through Other People's Money without a worry of posting a profit anytime this millennium, all the while unfettered by any silly requirements for backward compatibility to existing operations, then the future looks quite pleasant. However, for software developers at established organizations, caught in the cross-fire of the language wars, the operating system wars, the platform wars, the middle-ware wars, and the browser wars, laboring to push yet another release out the door under compressed schedules, weighed down by the millstone of legacy code, and torn asunder by the ravages of ill-conceived and ever-changing requirements, then the future looks grim-to put it mildly. Modesty prevents me from using the adjectives most commonly applied by developers toiling under such circumstances. Being among those inside the tornado, as was Dorothy, I prefer to think of these times as, well, "interesting."