2005-04-17 #2

1000 Man Years for Cellphone Software

In this this very interesting interview with James Gosling (the creator of the Java programming language), he says:

when you go and talk to companies like Motorola and Nokia, and you ask them “How long does it take you to do the cell phone mode; if you develop a new cell phone, how much software engineering goes into it?”. The numbers tend to hover around a thousand man years per cell phone. It’s astonishing numbers, and you look at the way that they sort of layer things and it just gets unbelievable. And they know that it’s stupid.

Can this possibly be true?