Software stinks, but not for the reasons you'd think...

While I agree that most software is overly complicated, over-engineered and inelegant, I would argue the point that simple software costs less. In fact, in my experience, beautiful software designed for the end user is much more difficult to achieve, if it's larger than a single-purpose system.

To further the metaphor, people have very specific expectations of a house. A house has to do one major thing - let a family live in it. Consider how much engineering it takes to design an office building, and how much more it costs to make an office building work for the number of types of people who occupy it. Now assume the office building has to be designed and built in half the time, with people who just started 3 weeks ago. Then consider the office building has to be occupied by 6 different companies, all of whom are too busy to tell you what they want. Cut the team in half, place unnecessary process controls on the whole project, and you get the typical software design project...

The best software is designed by the right people with very little waste. It's the process that yields good software, not just the talent of the people involved.

On the flip side, well-designed software is worth the cost =]