I think it was more about the corporate culture which dictated that people had a plan and stick to it. It's still the case in many trades. You don't build a ho

I think it was more about the corporate culture which dictated that people had a plan and stick to it. It's still the case in many trades. You don't build a house or a bridge the Agile way for instance. IMHO Agile got a lot more prevalent because the planning phase became more and more onerous to have any reliability, and management was tired of paying upfront for it. I steady they could get a more regular billing (in particular when dealing with consulting companies) with reports of stuff allegedly shipped, instead of six months of "we're planning very hard, just trust us". Whether the end result matched what they needed/wanted to build being another story. I know many companies that had an official Waterfall cycle, while actually working on something more granularly shipped with many phases of prototyping. And they didn't move to Agile either, just stopped calling their process anything and went on doing whatever felt right.