Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures (an investor in Bug Labs) mentioned a NY Times article to me yesterday that is flabbergasting.  It’s entitled "Another Heck of a Job" and details the $600M debacle (that’s not a typo) surrounding the effort to design and build a reliable, hand held device for the 2010 census takers.  I won’t go into too much detail here because Brad has posted a great piece on their blog.  The point is, it highlights the serious challenges organizations face when trying to innovate with hardware.

For me, while I shake my head at reading this stuff, I also know that this is just one that got reported.  These things are like cockroaches.  You see one, you know there are hundreds more hiding in the walls and cabinets.  That to me is the bigger disaster.  The waste is staggering.

UPDATE – I emailed Secretary Gutierrez (U.S. Secretary of Commerce) this morning offering to help with the design and construction of the necessary census device.  I’ll let you know if he responds.

Posted in Uncategorized by Peter Semmelhack | on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 7:21 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.