What is one advantage and one disadvantage of grassroots computing?

Takira T: What is one advantage and one disadvantage of grassroots computing?
What is one advantage and one disadvantage of grassroots computing? In your view, what should corporate policy be regarding end-user application development?

Answers and Views:

Answer by John Hightower
Disadvantage: Control – Who control the features and direction of the application?

Advantage: Grassroots – or customer driven development – is more likely to meet the needs to the people using the application. BUT is this really the people using the application or the people who are DEVELOPING the application?

BACKGROUND: I worked 32 years in application development & support. What the network engineers wanted to do, didn’t match with what the company or its employees needed.

Same can be said for the application developers. One group didn’t want to do any work – too much trouble training people in how to use the new features and too much responsibility to keep everything working. And another group of developers, wanted to constantly change everything – in some cases, just to get experience using a new command in the programming language.

And how do you get the network engineers, communication engineers, and application developers to all agree to something – if its a grassroots development?