Decreasing time between deployments is not guaranteed to always be a good thing unless you really do "work on deployments", which may not be best for your product.
Consider Firefox moving to six-week deployments and the negative impact it had. That could have been mitigated by a "work on deployment" that added value to a product.
Many enterprise software packages are painful to deploy. Having worked on these, I can tell you it is because hooking up a dozen systems is just complex. You could conceivably have a way to make that turnkey, but that "working on it" probably would not be good for your product as enterprise customers understand (and usually appreciate) the slower pace.
Somebody else said don't go cargo cult with this. I couldn't agree more, but certainly think about it, understand where it is wasting you money, and fix it.
Yes. This is a spot where Joel's analogy breaks down.
When a factory/bakery/whatever ships product, that's capital that's immediately converted to a liquid asset (cash). Unless your customers are paying per-feature as they are delivered (when does that ever happen? contracting?) software really doesn't work that way.
When your customers are paying for upgrades via support contract, and they don't get upgrades, they stop paying for the support contract. People have short memories, they need to see signs of activity. Delivering features they don't want gives them more hope that you will soon deliver the feature they do want, vs delivering no features at all.
Consider Firefox moving to six-week deployments and the negative impact it had. That could have been mitigated by a "work on deployment" that added value to a product.
Many enterprise software packages are painful to deploy. Having worked on these, I can tell you it is because hooking up a dozen systems is just complex. You could conceivably have a way to make that turnkey, but that "working on it" probably would not be good for your product as enterprise customers understand (and usually appreciate) the slower pace.
Somebody else said don't go cargo cult with this. I couldn't agree more, but certainly think about it, understand where it is wasting you money, and fix it.