Computer salespeople are rarely programmers! It is the marketing
types that make promises such as "We can write software to do X in Y
months". The programmers usually hear about this promise afterwards
and can only roll their eyes and do their best to fullfill the hype.
Perhaps we have a similar situation in the socio-economic policy
marketplace where the chest-thumping politicians promise "We can
create laws or programs to do X in Y months", and the socio-economic
scientists can only roll their eyes and set out to gather as much data
as they can from the latest experiment.
Mark Crosby