I'm getting delicious hints of Brooks, Gall, Deming, and Meadows in this mix. Just reading through the TOC it feels like he's building the premises for a knock-down argument against code mono-cultures built by giant teams and delivered JIT on the meanest budget by corrupt monopolies. But then of course he is.

As Ian Sommerville more or less said it the other day, we've got the philosophies, the textbooks, the smart people, the pragmatism, and the need, so why don't we get to build the quality of software we know in our hearts we can make and deserve? Is what we call "infrastructure" today a stagnation by which Capitalism ultimately eats its own means of innovation?