There is a long and ignoble tradition in the software industry of programmers who prey on the ignorance of managers and executives to convince them in uselessne

There is a long and ignoble tradition in the software industry of programmers who prey on the ignorance of managers and executives to convince them in uselessness of productivity enhancing technologies so that the programmers can enjoy building their own productivity enhancing technologies that are subjectively (and very rarely objectively) superior to alternatives. At least we agree on the ignorance of managers and executives :) It is difficult to pin down your argument, since it isn't clear if you are talking in anecdotes about specific instances of product failures or if you are describing the entire marketplace. Assuming your claim is about the latter, you are missing the context of the general trends: yes, most of the "new crop of tools" that come out every few years fail. However that is in line with most new products -- over 90% of new software products that are released every year fail, so it shouldn't be surprising that tool products fail at a similar rate. However, at what point are you throwing baby out with bathwater? Just because most of the workflow products are crap, doesn't mean there aren't a few innovative ones that truly improve productivity and deserve to be used. Finally, you are confusing programming and writing workflows or designing business processes. Very much like BNF grammars are an effective way of describing parsers, flowcharts (or workflows) are an effective way of describing invariant, sequential operations. Neither are an effective general purpose programming language.