Why does software still take years to ship when months should be enough?

Across startups and large enterprises alike, we keep solving the same problems: security, scalability, networking, observability, deployment.

Over the years we added tools, layers, frameworks, and now AI. Yet idea-to-production still takes years in environments where months should be achievable.

This did not happen by accident, but it did become normalized. I am trying to understand how this happened and what would actually reverse it.

In enterprise, you are dealing with many years of decisions, integrations, and changes in architecture. Business processes changes, development team processes change, IT vendors change, and leadership changes. You also do not have the source code to everything that the business depends on. What you have are the glue scripts and integrations to various black boxes that change their behavior every update. This is not a question about DevOps. It is also not a question about business process or change management. With large organizations, this is really more about governance and regulating the different independent vested interests.