Manufacturing has many engineering disciplines. One that struck me when I first heard of it was Design for Maintainability. You don't want to engineer an car where you have to remove the engine to change the oil filter. One of the benefits of the old days was the solution was limited. We had one online system, one DBMS, batch, and two languages. Now there are a million technologies, and no end in site. In designing our business applications we are engineering for the WOW, and not always for the maintainability. We have custom controls, on custom frameworks, on custom applications. When we bring a new person on to the team (it's an ASP.NET application) it makes little difference how much ASP.NET they know, as they have to learn a new, unique, complex framework, and the learning curve is measured in months - The cost of complexity. At one point in time GM engineered and manufactured 13 different gas caps. How many ORMs do we need? How much WOW do we need? Just give me a good button and a list box and I'll be happy.