A recent article by Tom Demarco "Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?" is a must read. It makes the "obvious" point that we should be working on projects that are really useful and not working on projects that are relatively useless.
Knowing the bottom line is implicit in the article, but often ignored by some really smart people. Most of the projects I've worked on over the years, even very successful ones, have rarely done the leg work to get estimates of how much money a project could potentially make and even more rare have looked at what the project could realistically make.
Instead the project is often done because the person funding it thinks it's a good idea or the person selling the idea to them is really good at selling the idea.
I like giving engineers the freedom to create and work on things that they are passionate about. This is generally a good idea because they work on things they like and generally if one person likes it many will. However, sometimes this isn't true.
So before you start your next project spend some time figuring out the bottom line. If it's marginal go on to another idea.
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