I once worked on a project at Qualcomm and wondered if the head had any idea what he was doing. I went to him and asked what is the complexity of a change you are willing to put up with for a 1% increase in cellular sector throughput. He had no idea. I should have quit the next day. The project was a commercial failure (802.20). Too big and late to market. Same problem that killed CISC machines. Most Linux developers never think in these terms and hence, long term, Linux is dead.