No he really is talking about failure not releasing. He is specifically talking about the core design and iterating over the design to optimize it before releas

No he really is talking about failure not releasing. He is specifically talking about the core design and iterating over the design to optimize it before releasing. His take is that on mega-budget projects there isn't a luxury to do this and so it is better to just pick and freeze the design at the start and stay the course regardless of what happens. I totally agree with you that this thinking is self-destructive. What isn't mentioned here are development teams that aren't doing this but will (probably) be fairly successful, like the new Starcraft 2 game. Alternative methods like agile dev or stage gate would take longer and cost more but are more likely to produce more fun. I think this blog post is a good explanation: http://lostgarden.com/2007/02/rockets-cars-and-gardens-visualizing.html http://lostgarden.com/2007/02/rockets-cars-and-gardens-visua...