The Difficulties of Innovation, Timing, and Commercialization Led by the projects' needs, a forms management system was created that included many of the fourth/fifth-generation DBMS capabilities of today; those did not exist at that time. It was an excellent system which could have been commercialized, had our company been in the commercial market. That did not happen since we were (and are) a large aerospace company who works mostly on contracts. Keep in mind, as mentioned before, that the team had many young, entrepreneurial, and very creative folks who thrived in the envi- ronment being brought about by this innovative project. As a result of the lack of interest in commercialization, a few of those folks left the company, some to try new endeavors, others to work on their own to build tools that could be commercialized. The Iron Law of Software Maintenance The Iron Law of Software Maintenance says that for every dollar you put into develop- ment, you will have to spend $2 to keep the product viable over its life cycle. The Software Productivity System began as a free service to projects, and it became too hard to switch to having projects pay for its maintenance. Thus, as time went by, the project had fewer and fewer resources to add new features. For example, the forms management system was the world's best system of its kind in 1982; by 1986, it was still the world's best 1982 system of its kind, but had become eclipsed by commercial forms management systems with broader financial and user bases.