May
11
Written by:
Joel Orr
5/11/2006
Engineers love to PRODUCE the newest, latest, greatest stuff. But they hate to spend money, and they hate risk. So if you examine the most wonderful engineering innovatins of recent years, you'll find out they were produced by guys working - well, ok, not with sliderules - but with '386's running DOS, and lots of scraps of paper.
There is a reason engineers are conservative: People's lives often depend on their work products. That's why the Society of the Engineer inducts its members with a rough iron ring, to remind them of a bridge near Ottawa that collapsed due to faulty engineering.
But that conservative attitiude makes it very hard to sell them new tools. And new tools may be the only path to some classes of innovation.
I wonder why, after all these years of selling software to engineers, so many engineering software companies' marketing messages are still so full of hype and bombast. It must be having some kind of an impact, or they wouldn't keep doing it.
Or would they?