A big part of the issue is that distributed computing is hard to think about, for the same reasons that multithreading are hard to think about: the single threa

A big part of the issue is that distributed computing is hard to think about, for the same reasons that multithreading are hard to think about: the single threaded model (either on a local machine or amongst a set of machines via something like RPC) is much easier to think about most of the time, even if it's the wrong overall solution. Conway's Law only kicks in when organizational issues FORCE distribution, and people are forced to think in a distributed way. It's an entirely different way of thinking about a problem, based entirely on giving up control.