I think tools are an important part of the equation. Say you are paying someone to demolish your concrete driveway. Would you pay someone with a jack hammer w

I think tools are an important part of the equation. Say you are paying someone to demolish your concrete driveway. Would you pay someone with a jack hammer who can get the job done in an hour the same rate you'd pay someone with a sledgehammer, which will take 8 hours? The task is the same. The value of the completed project is the same. But if the jack hammer owner charges a fix bid billed for half the hourly rate of the sledge hammer owner, he spends an hour and gets paid for four. In a fixed bid contract, the jack hammer could charge 50% more than he would estimate the demolition (originally billed at half the hourly rate of the sledge of 4 hours) at 6 hours and still make more money and spend less time: 6x as much money and spend 1/8th as much time completing the job. If his estimate was way under actuals and it ends up taking him twice as long (2 hours) as he originally thought it would take, which was 1 hour, he still makes triple the hourly rate for two hours of work (6 hour billed estimate, 2 hours of work) than the guy with the sledge hammer! The use of tools that accelerate task completion, in this case an 8x improvement (jack over sledge) enables the jackhammer operator to underestimate the labor times and still make more money at lower times to completion. Plus, the driveway owner gets his demolished driveway in 25% of the time that it would have taken with a sledgehammer and that is still at a project overrun of 100%! But the world doesn't understand equations like this or really accept the value of advanced technologies. I use technology to build custom software products that are way more advanced than what typical developers use, so I can build them 10x faster and charge half the rate and still make more money! I know a local case where a company is paying a guy to use Perl to build a data driven website using files -- instead of an SQL Database. he's been working on the website for over 5 months and it still isn't finished and it has already reached the maximum of its flexibility. It's already going to have to be re-architected to enable the features the client wants now. If the local company had gone with our company, which uses a flexible sql based infrastructure, then the project would have been completed in about 2 weeks and still have lots of flexibility to go! New features would be easy to add. Now, the programmer is coming to us asking to use our technology to help him complete his project! So, I love the current state of the software world. Frustrated customers paying too much for projects that typically fail are a great market segment.