This is all worth reading, fine and good, but one thing people have difficulty with is risk, what that means at scale, and other strategic considerations. If 8

This is all worth reading, fine and good, but one thing people have difficulty with is risk, what that means at scale, and other strategic considerations. If 8/10 new companies fail, it should be expected that most new product initiatives fail as well, at least at some phase of the cycle. What's hard to fathom is that for a massive company, the risks can entail quite a bit of spending. Some things have strategic importance even if few customers are using the service/feature such as having a comparable feature set to competitors (because the customers always ask about that even if they never use the feature, it 'needs' to exist. Sometimes to keep things cooking against an alternative substitute as perennial leverage (like building out natural gas infrastructure in case the Russians decide to cut you off!). Often things are done because just one, specific 'big' customer asks for it, or there is a regulatory concern. I've worked on projects that existed so there would be no appearance of malfeasance. Often projects are basically 'know-how R&D' that may or may not pan out. Apple did a couple of iterations with cars and shut them down. Now apparently it's back up ... but could get shut down again. And finally, though some might argue otherwise, sometimes people are 'doing stuff' because a company will not justify a paycheck for sitting around, and management doesn't want to layoff because it's just socially difficult and / or they want to keep resources. Often we feel that corporations are evil about layoffs and productivity, I feel it's a bit the other way - if we truly wanted to we could cut pretty hard without affecting productivity. Most people, even execs, don't really want to do layoffs, they will avoid it if they can. But yes, a lot of work is straight rubbish.