Business Software Needs A Revolution

An anonymous reader writes "According to a Businessweek Online article, today's high-end business software is bloated, buggy, and too expensive - no surprise to those of us who have paid our bills by adding pointless features to some piece of software arbitrarily priced at $100k. Evidently, firms are now re-evaluating their software purchases, and finding that they're not working out the way the sales guys told them they would."

Comments

Just goes to show...

[Xerithane]

it's no accident that Sales and Marketing is S&M.

They just chose who is in the bondage.

sales people

[frieked]

they're not working out the way the sales guys told them they would

What?!, a dishonest sales person? Never!

Salesmen lie...

[Anonymous Coward]

Film at 11.

Sales and Marketing

[n0vh]

You mean the Sales and Marketing department oversold the capabilities? Say it isn't so. On a former project, we needed to emulate a remote system for some testing. We wrote some code that responded for that system, as it was expected to, so that you always got the answer you wanted from it. It was affectionately called the Marketing Server.

ok,

[Anonymous Coward]

> finding that they're not working out the way the sales guys told them they would.

ok 2 old jokes:

Q: what's the difference between a used car salesman and a software salesman?
A: the used car salesman knows when he's lieing.

Q: how can you tell if a software salesman is telling a lie?
A: his lips are moving.

one can learn this fact from Dilbert cartoons

[porky_pig_jr]

no need to do any research ...

Word is the worst thing that has ever been written

[teamhasnoi]

It saves in a proprietary format.
It has imprecise layout options.
It second guesses your decisions.
It is ginormous for what it does.
It has encouraged use of Bold, Italics, and MS Comic Sans
It sucks CPU cycles like a 40-dollar whore.
It indexes every last damn file on your PC.
It saves information that you really don't want distributed in every file.
It has an annoying mascot.
It has been ported to mac.
It is used by mac users.
It gives you hell whenever you don't want to save as a .doc file.
It is far too expensive.
It has too many features.
It encourages use of MS Comic Sans
and...

It encourages use of MS Comic Sans.

Thanks.

Shocking revelations

[mao che minh]

Water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. Plants tend to grom primarily in soil. The sun is hot.

Marketing people overstate the usefulness of their products in order to sell them.

Wow.

As an investment strategy....

[Anonymous Coward]

once the word gets out on this time to short SAP, Oracle/Peoplesoft/JD Edwards, and any other ERP/CRM maker....

Easy to fix.

[uberdave]

Lock the sales people in a room with a computer and a development system. When they have coded all the features they sold, they can come out...

...and spend the next few months taking tech support calls.

Where does this software come from?

[Nick of NSTime]

I've always wondered where vertical market software comes from (like how companies find out about it; just salesmen?), and why customers would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for crappy DOS programs written in Clipper. It seems like all one would have to do to overcome vertical market competition is build something that looks better, works better, and costs less.

I've seen it first-hand in the aviation industry. I worked for a small aviation company that sold fractional ownership of airplanes, as well as provided executive jet services and medical flights. Aviation-related data was all entered into an ancient DOS program that stored data in a single .dbf file on a central server. The DOS program cost $125,000 and $15,000 a year for maintenance. This was in 2000! The company that made the software was shocked that we were able to share the application on a Citrix server (and they threatened to sue).