The 1-2 years is merely to get it reworked, not up to specification. Which is a problem with DoD contracting. As time passes there are shifting priorities as other technologies are developed and need to be countered. It's difficult to fully modularize without stagnation. I worked on a project where the microprocessor that was core to the product needed to have a proven track record, so it started off old. By the time development and qualification testing was done the microprocessor was essentially obsolete for general purpose computing.
It's really up to the DoD and the Chief Executive to draw a line and say that they are going to stick with what they have regardless of evolving threats or opportunities and shift that effort to the next in line.
In a way it's like a software release. If one keeps futzing with it because a competitor has a new feature or the UI guys had a brainstorm, the product will never get out the door and the product will get clobbered anyway.
Yes, I worked 35 years for a company that developed and sold software, and we had to constantly be aware of the tendency to try to get that last little enhancement into the next version of the software, and I worked in the that part of the company that had to decide what we were spending our resources on. Note that I did not write code, but rather worked developing specifications based on both what our customers were expecting and what we needed to do to remain competitive. There were a few concepts that we always had to keep in mind.
One was the 80-20 rule. This was where we had to keep in mind that the first 80% of almost any project could be accomplished within budget and on time, but the last 20% could take much longer and cost much more, so it was important to not over commit, keeping expectations so that the 80% actually represented what we had promised or what the customer was expecting, which led to another principle and that was that perfect was the enemy of good enough. When we announced what we were going to deliver in a certain version of the software, unless some totally unexpected situation were to come up, all we had to contractually deliver is what we promised. Spending time and resources on something beyond the previously published spec was not what we should be doing. You either save it for the next version or you decide whether it's really needed in the first place. Many times we had customers asking for something that they didn't really need and sometimes we had to educate them as to how they could get what they wanted with what they already had or what was going to be coming in the next version. The same with responding to competitive pressures. There were times when what a competitor was offering wasn't always what it might look like or delivered the benefits promised and then my job was to convince our customers that we were on track to deliver the enhancements and capabilities that we had determined would meet their requirements even if it didn't feel or look like what a competitor was promising. Granted, we were dealing in an environment where once a company decided to use a certain piece of software, after a couple of years and a couple of updates, it was going to be very expensive to switch over to another software product, and I'll admit that we took advantage of this, but it only works in the short term, eventually you had both stay competitive and meet the needs expressed by our customers.
And we must have been doing something right since when I joined the company, our product, when people listed our annual sales or installed seats, we were listed in 'other', and there were about 13 named products ahead of us. When I retired 35-years later, there was basically only three vendors left in the marketplace, and along the way, as we achieved our success, we ended-up acquiring several of those 13 companies which at one time was out ahead of us. Granted, some just fell by the wayside, but at least four of them was to eventually be absorbed outright by us, while in other situations, we just won over those customers whose software supplier had fallen so far behind that the customers were willing to spend the money and expend the effort to change to another vendor.
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