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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."
My small company is in the process of doing just what you describe. We are only working with vendors that will allow live demos of their packages. It it taking a lot of time to work through the packages, but we have already disqualified two vendors in the demo step. Initialy they looked very good. However, after some "real world" use, major flaws were exposed. We feel the time is well spent before buying some package and regreting it.
Now I also have no love of MSWord, but FUD must be combatted:
"It indexes every last damn file on your PC."
So you forgot to turn off FindFast.
"It saves information that you really don't want distributed in every file."
So you forgot to install the GUID patch that causes it to not add your MAC address to all the files you save.
"It has an annoying mascot."
So you forgot to unclick the checkbox for the "office assistant" during the MSOffice installation. Even if you didn't install office, just rename the "actors" directory and clippy will be gone.
I don't like Word either!! But I have to use it at the office and frankly I don't think that OpenOffice is mature enough yet, so I make sure I learn ways to make Word less annoying.
I'm the guy an awful lot of product managers despise- a Sales Engineer. Sales engineers are paid to validate the lies told by salespeople through the use of whiteboards and (smoke+mirror) demos. Sales Engineers (also called SEs) are often more evil than salespeople because we know when we are lying. We have computer science degrees yet we realized that we can make 25% more than software developers and work less.
Bunk! 2 (or 10, or 20) engineers are going to recreate Oracle in a year? Tell that to the MySQL team! Most business software is a lot more complex than you seem to think.
And, even if true, that year cost money. What am I supposed to do while I wait for you two geniuses to get done? One the main reasons people buy off-the-shelf software is to save time.
"There are some companies out there (M$ being the prime example) that don't add much in the way of new functionality, but rather repackage things, move buttons and menus around and make the new incompatible with the old. At the same time they only fix certain bugs, but leave others alone. Yet people buy their crap at record rates."
To be fair, Microsoft do add functionality and bug fixes to new releases. Few would argue that driver handling in Win XP (to name just one thing) is not a huge improvement over the way driverws were handled in Win 98. Despite the Fisher-Price GUI (which one can change back to the old Windows look, thank God), I'd say that XP is a pretty decent OS for home use. But would people upgrade to this new OS purely to get rid of some bugs and problems?
The market is demanding new bells and whistles. How many people would purchase a new version of MS Office, if it would look exactly the same as the previous one, and didn't add any new features? I've been to Microsoft sales presentations. All the people there, like me, were there to make a decision for their company to purchase the latest & greatest to come out of Redmond. You should have heard the Ooohs and Aaahs as each new (and completely pointless) feature was presented.
In fact, I firmly believe that new features and a new look and feel go a long way toward convincing potential buyers that all your old bugs and issues have been fixed. You'd expect the opposite... new features mean new bugs, but no. If you're in the software business, you might want to try the following experiment when you roll out a new version of your product: give half your customers the new version, but with the same splash screen and GUI as the previous version, and give the other half exactly the same new version, but with a different splash screen and with a new look-and-feel. (Redesigning the button icons will be sufficient). Then ask all the users to fill in a short customer satisfaction questionnaire, asking how this new version performs compared to the old one. Does it perform better, meet their needs better, has less bugs, etc. You might be surprised by the outcome...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The blurb that was submitted puts an unfortunate spin on the comments. It's not so much that marketing told them the wrong thing -- it's a failure of management to fully identify and evaluate their needs. I've seen it happen time and time again where a million dollar project gets flushed down the tube a year later because no one is using it anymore. The software works fine -- it's just that business priorities weren't quite there to get everyone on the system and plans changed. In some cases, the product is flawed and full of bugs, but most of the time, the product doesn't suit the business requirements.
Iâ(TM)m currently working for a Fortune 500 company in the IT department, and the pendulum is swinging from custom development to off-the-shelf packages (including PeopleSoft and a few others that are smaller in scale). Iâ(TM)m a developer, so I have a bit of a biased opinion. That said, there are a few reasons that Iâ(TM)ve seen for the desire for IT middle-management to go for off-the-shelf tech. And, of course, the first reason is because it is seen as easier than custom, in house, dev work. Face it, if youâ(TM)re a middle manager and you have a project that is over schedule and budget, with an internal dev team the blame is with the manager in the team. With an outside vendor, you have many more excuses. Other reasons include lack of knowledge of software dev practices (which leads to the perception that software dev is just too difficult), the preference to deal with a vendor rather than manage a large number of people, and so on.
Iâ(TM)ve certainly seen internal software dev spin out of control here, but Iâ(TM)ve seen the same kind mess with the off-the-shelf software. You pay the base price, then for the consultants to come in and configure it (for weeks or months on end), then you pay for support and upgrades. And you train the users to use a product that often has a difficult to use UI. And retrain them again each upgrade cycle. And, as has been posted already, the users are sometimes forced to adapt the business process to the software, rather than the other way around.
I donâ(TM)t think that everything should always be done in-house. Itâ(TM)s not always advantageous for a company to have to create its own dev and QA team, as well as get good managers who can oversee the project cycle. Especially for software to suite the companyâ(TM)s basic needs, which may not change very quickly. There just needs to be an alternative to these massive enterprise software/consulting companies, many of which seem to center their business model on keeping consultants on the tab for as long as possible.
Someone hates these cans.
I'd kill for direct access to the underlying DB or a nice clear way of moving data in and out, or a great way to make custom GUI... but the company is more concerned with ensuring that we are locked in FOREVER than with providing the tools we could use to make their software more friendly to our over all IT enviroment.
J.D. Edwards has a design that accommodates things like a custom GUI. In JDE, the business logic of the "system" is implemented in a layer of "business functions". These are API function calls that perform the usual create, update, delete operations, but at the level of business abstractions, such as documents (orders, customers, etc.) All of the necessary validation is performed in these functions. The APIs are documented and there are several thousand of them. The APIs are then exposed through multiple mechanisms to the developer (C libraries, Java objects, XML, proprietary forms/report methods, etc.) This design provides the developer with a means to wrap the full functionality of the system in a custom interface, with the same validation as the vendor provided interface.
The only problem with the JDE system is a lack of solid documentation on the interaction of all of the functions. A single business "document", such as an invoice, may involve a minimum of 6 business function calls. Exactly what calls are necessary, and in what order, is not public knowledge, as far as I know. You can discover it by examining system source code or doing debug traces, but that's a major roadblock in some cases.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Right, I take it you're an Oracle employee.
Lets start with some figures...
In the quarter to May '00, Oracle sold $250m of new application licenses in the Americas. (A pretty solid number all round.)
Three years later it sold half that number.
SAP, PeopleSoft both did better. (And in SAP's case, they did it despite some really horrible currency disadvantages.)
In Europe, the numbers are even more frightening.
Oracle's share of the enterprise applications market on a rolling 12-month view - and I'm happy to send my spreadsheet to anyone who's interested - has fallen from 12% to 8% in the last two years.
How much moeny did Oracle make off it? Not as much as some might like to think.
Oracle has $7bn of cash in the bank. But most of that came from the sales of Liberate and Oracle Japan (which netted it $6bn in the last three years). If this is removed, Oracle doesn't look nearly so profitable.
Anyway, rant over. Oracle has performed horribly relative to most peers (i2 excepted). Their software is technically interesting, but on customer satisfaction surveys, only Siebel looks worse.
Well, now that I've upset every single employee of every enterprise software vendor, I'm off to bed.
Regards,
Robert
--- My dad's political betting