What Makes Software Development So Hard?

lizzyben writes to mention that CIO Insight is running a short piece that takes a look at why the rocky culture of software development continues to exist despite all of the missed deadlines, blown budgets, and broken promises. From the article: "I was not really looking or thinking about big software projects. I was just coming out of my experiences at Salon, where we built a content management system in 2000, which was painful. I was one of the people in charge of it, and when the dust cleared, I thought, I don't really know that much about software development. Other people must have figured it out better than I have; I must go and learn. So I started reading, and talking to people, and realized it's a big subject and an unsolved problem. And the bigger the project, the harder the problem."